I'm going to take an old dell and throw three ethernet cards into it. I plan on using one for the wan, one for lan, and then another into an AP for captive portal. the box will be used as a gateway, router, etc (basically to give me more options than my linksys has now). Which distro would you guys suggest (or any other recomendations)?
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Monowall v Smoothwall v ipCop
- Thread starter Rakinos
- Start date
I would recommend you take a look at www.pfsense.com
I have been using it quite a while. It is a fork of m0n0wall and works great.
I have been using it quite a while. It is a fork of m0n0wall and works great.
DragonNOA1
Supreme [H]ardness
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I've tried 'em all and monowall was the easiest to use and install for me.
Monowall rocks. Pfsense is like a super monowall.
Upside to monowall is it runs off RAM and loads off a compact flash card. This means to you super reliable because there is no hard drive to die. Even better if you build it on a WRAP or soekris board.
Upside to pfsense is it is feature laden.
They are both based off FreeBSD, which you can just read as reliable.
If you want to consider it a downside, monowall only does routing/firewall/NAT and a few little extras. You don't want a device such as this doing too much as that in itself is a security design flaw in my opinion.
So in short...
MONOWALL
Upside to monowall is it runs off RAM and loads off a compact flash card. This means to you super reliable because there is no hard drive to die. Even better if you build it on a WRAP or soekris board.
Upside to pfsense is it is feature laden.
They are both based off FreeBSD, which you can just read as reliable.
If you want to consider it a downside, monowall only does routing/firewall/NAT and a few little extras. You don't want a device such as this doing too much as that in itself is a security design flaw in my opinion.
So in short...
MONOWALL
Asgorath said:
btw just thought you should know... while there is no hard drive to fail, memory cards DO die. I think in one of those sites (mono, smooth, or pf sense) it says to make sure you dont have to be constantly writting to the card, because they can eventually fail. While yes the possibility is low of that happening, I think its higher than an HDD. I dont know if this applies to all cards, or to only cheap ones, but the concept stands.
JP said:
here found it.
"The only shortcoming of CF cards is the relatively low number of write/delete cycles that the memory will support before failing. While this is measured in figures of hundreds of thousands, a firewall permanently connected to the Internet that is configured to write an entry to the system log for every blocked IP packet is going to hit that limitation fairly quickly"
JP said:
You are right with one caveat.
Monowall is designed to boot off the CF card, load it into RAM, and then run the system with no swapspace.
This means very few reads from the CF card, and the only time it is written to is when you update the master XML file that holds all the settings.
Super reliable. Period.
One nice way to verify the low level of disk activity from m0n0wall is to use it with a normal IDE disk and set it to spin it down after a few minutes. I have a setup like that in my room, and the only times I can hear it spin up are when I change rules.
(And if you want it to do logging, it can be set up to log to another server on the network instead of locally.)
(And if you want it to do logging, it can be set up to log to another server on the network instead of locally.)
fireburster
[H]ard|Gawd
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I use smoothwall at home and I have three at work. Its easy to setup and I think it works great. I tried monowall but it didnt like my pc i was trying to install it on. Smoothwall has a nice forum and site with lots of help. I think all of my smoothwalls have been up 50+days now. I havent tried 3 nics though.
I have a friend at work using ipcop with 3 nics and loves that also.
I have a friend at work using ipcop with 3 nics and loves that also.
I run ipcop at home. I found it to work best by far. I have mine running off a 512mb CF card for over a year with out any problems. The longest up peroid I had so far was 6 months, it would have kept going, but I moved. 
I am running it using 4 nics (green, blue running as green, a dmz and the intarweb) and it manages all the subnets wonderfully.
I am running it using 4 nics (green, blue running as green, a dmz and the intarweb) and it manages all the subnets wonderfully.If you're going to put it on that kinda machine, I would say go smoothwall or ipCop. They're both very good.
Monowall excels where you want a more basic, but very robust setup. Smoothwall and ipCop both do more, but need more computer. Monowall is designed to run off a flash card for super reliable operation.
Monowall excels where you want a more basic, but very robust setup. Smoothwall and ipCop both do more, but need more computer. Monowall is designed to run off a flash card for super reliable operation.
Rakinos said:
Out of the box IPCop has a blue zone for wireless that computers needs to have a registered mac to be able to access the internet. There is a plugin that you can install the allows you to make it so people get a web page stating whatever you want so they know what to do to get the internet.
Just as a background, IPCop is a fork in the SmoothWall project. SmoothWall Express (the free version) doesn't see that much development. This is what's nice IPCop. It sees regular updates and development.
IPCop also can be configured to boot off compact flash. That's how I use it. I boot from compact flash on a thin client. Works like a champ.
Here's how I see the differences between MonoWall and IPCop. Monowall is a more traditional firewall where you configure rules to allow or dissallow traffic. IPCop is more of a "let everything out, nothing in" type of firewall.
IPCop also can be configured to boot off compact flash. That's how I use it. I boot from compact flash on a thin client. Works like a champ.
Here's how I see the differences between MonoWall and IPCop. Monowall is a more traditional firewall where you configure rules to allow or dissallow traffic. IPCop is more of a "let everything out, nothing in" type of firewall.
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I use Smoothwall at home and we have 6 at work
I run a computer lab in which teenagers are allowed internet access at certain times so I mainly use the Full Firewall Control , Advanced Web Proxy, and Urlfilter mods to control access and keep the icky sites blocked or the internet all together.
I havn't used the other 2 mentioned , so can't make a comparison.
I run a computer lab in which teenagers are allowed internet access at certain times so I mainly use the Full Firewall Control , Advanced Web Proxy, and Urlfilter mods to control access and keep the icky sites blocked or the internet all together.
I havn't used the other 2 mentioned , so can't make a comparison.