Firewall Distro with best online community?

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rotteneggz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 12, 2004
Messages
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I've been playing around with pfsense alot lately and realised that there online community kinda sucks. I've made a couple of posts on their forums and still, after about one week, have no reply's. However, Pfsense really is awesome. Are there any other firewalls with better online community?
Better yet, are there anyone here that tried to run a firewall on a virtual machine? If so wich one?
 
I've used IPCop's forums a few times and have had helpful responses.

pfSense works great but you're right, their official forums lack of active members.
 
Untangle and pfSense but agreed that pfSense has a lack of active members on their forums.
 
If i run untangle on a virtual machine, will it suck all my system resources? will i have enough for gaming and other random stuff?

System Specs:
Core2Quad q6600
4gb Ram
geforece 8800 GTS 512mb

All i want is security/reliability and QoS
 
Are you planning to run it in a VM?

I would recommend building a small cheap box dedicated to it.

I wouldn't want to have that running on my main machine that I game on.
 
IPCop probably has the biggest community out there.....but IMO it's a platform that is a bit long in the tooth. Works well though.

PFSense had some huge forums...and a still a pretty big community, but their forums have slowed a bit.

Untangle is very new to the scene, its forums have a few very active and helpful members. While not a huge forum membership, you can find help fairly quickly there. An impressive distro that is growing fast. Their phone support is very fast and helpful too.

Sadly one of my prior favorite UTM distros has a rather quiet support community...Endian.
 
The only one I have any experience with is Untangle, and so far, I have been pretty happy with finding information that I need.
 
criccio said:
Are you planning to run it in a VM?

I would recommend building a small cheap box dedicated to it.

I wouldn't want to have that running on my main machine that I game on.
Click to expand...

Yes im planning on dropping it in VMware. Kinda low on $$, and i mean really low so i'm trying to do it the cheapest way possible :D
 
2nd for fav distro with no help.. Endian. Thinking of switching as i cant get RDC to work on more then one pc when it should.

Maybe i need to try Untangle.
 
If you want the biggest community, IPCop or Smoothwall by far. They have the most mods, most info on the net, and overall just a huge support group. Even though others might come more full featured out of the box (ex. Untangle), the communities and mods for IPCop and Smoothwall are just amazing.

Personally I really like Endian right now, but wish there were more mods and such. Just not much backing it. Untangle has never been a big interest for me as I do not work with many networks large enough requiring a full UTM device and the power demands require a good machine instead of an old thing laying around that can be implemented fully for very little money.

I also think the firewall side is better handled by some distros such as smoothwall/ipcop/pfsense/m0n0wall in comparison to other distros that focus more on other features (like Untangle, ClarkConnect, etc.). Not saying they are not good, they just all have their place IMO. If you want lots of content blocking/scanning/etc. then a UTM like Untangle is great. If you want just beefed up WAN -> LAN security against firewall type attacks and a good solid router, something simpler like IPCop/Smoothwall/PFSense is more applicable.
 
rotteneggz said:
Yes im planning on dropping it in VMware. Kinda low on $$, and i mean really low so i'm trying to do it the cheapest way possible :D
Click to expand...

If you just give it one core you should be ok. One of my buddies runs his on a Core2 with some other apps and it works great. The only issue could be RAM. I would recommend a gig for untangle which leaves you less for your regular applications. Might be worthwhile to upgrade the RAM.
 
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