Pfsense vs....?

IceDigger

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Feb 22, 2001
Messages
12,081
What do you use for your custom network from the source?

What do you use for your home network?

What would you recomend for an under 100 user business?

Pfsense, clearos, zentyal, etc....?
 
I use to use untangle, but got tired of the heat/power draw from the hardware so i switch to a Ubiquity security gateway. Besides the pain in the butt bizarre setup it operates pretty well.
 
We don't do much in the way of "custom". Earlier this year we installed Ubiquiti USG appliances for a customer.

Home use bounces between Ubiquiti USG, Ubiquiti Edge Router X, and Sonicwall TZ 300w or TZ 500.

For recommendations, I would ask budget and use case. 100 users is pretty vague.
 
In the past I have used Untagle, IPCop in small businesses for Linux based firewalls. I liked IPCop better, but I hadn't seen any development on it for a while there. It looks like it was forked and is now being updated. The fork is something like IPFire.

I did things with IPCop that other firewalls at the time could not do. I had a customer at the time who had 3 public IP addresses, and 10 servers for various things. Three web servers, 2 e-mail servers, 2 FTP servers, 3 custom application servers. So each IP address send requests to different servers based on ports.

I've also managed Sonicwall, Watchguard, and Fortigate as well in small/medium businesses.

At home right now I have a Meraki Mx64.

Who knows what the future may bring. I may go back to IPFire on an Intel NUC or something like that.
 
Used Astaro way back in the day...I think Sophos bought it since then and charges after 50 IPs

There is also Mikrotik

Currently running PfSense on a separate box but thinking about virtualizing it and putting it on my KVM host with the rest of my applications.

For SMB, I would just buy an ASA5506 and not worry about it. They are cheap enough and once running are set and forget....unless you want to make money supporting it in which case go all in on one of the other solutions.
 
I would and do use Fortinet firewalls and APs for myself and customers of all sizes. They have models for 10 users all the way to enterprise and government customers. I've recently begun to dabble with their switches as well and so far I am happy with them. I prefer a single vendor approach when dealing with smaller customers. One thing you did not mention is exactly what services you wish to provide. To make a proper recommendation that info would be required.
 
Back
Top