Protect Your Network with the Linux-based Untangle Gateway

Added to the list, that is, of firewall/router distros at such sites as DistroWatch's 'Linux and BSD-based Firewalls and Broadband Routers', http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=firewalls ??

As the Geier piece explains:

Quoting:Laying down some cash can get you premium support and better Web, virus, and SPAM protection. They also offer WAN Balancer and Failover Apps, so you can have redundancy for your Internet access. Plus they offer Apps to improve the network policies, remote access to the network, and remote control of computers on the network.

You can either install packages of these Apps or install individually. You can visit their site for more details on their free and paid features. All the premium features are available with a 14-day free trial.

ClarkConnect also has a commercial Internet server and gateway product, see http://www.clarkconnect.com/. AAMOF, ClarkConnect released both Enterprise and Community version 5.0 this past month.

And SmoothWall also has both a commercial and a free Open Source firewall product, see http://www.smoothwall.org/ Its commercial firewall product is called SmoothWall Limited and its free firewall product is the 2008 Best of Open Source Software Award-winner, SmoothWall Express.

It may therefore come as a surprise (or not?) that BSD-based pfsense was the top-rated firewall/router distro at fsckin's 'Seven Different Linux/BSD Firewalls Reviewed', http://www.fsckin.com/2007/11/14/7-different-linuxbsd-firewa... pfsense rated higher than both ClarkConnect's and Smoothwall's free firewall/router products.

As opposed to the commercial gateway products from Untangle, ClarkConnect and Smoothwall, ALL the following Open Source firewall/router projects remain free: - BSD-based m0n0wall, http://m0n0.ch/wall/ - BSD-based pfsense, http://www.pfsense.com/ - Devil-Linux, http://www.devil-linux.org - IPCop, http://www.ipcop.org/ - FREESCO and floppyfw for systems that still have floppy disk-drives installed; websites http://www.freesco.org/ and http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ respectively - Zeroshell, http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/ , which Geier discussed in a previous LinuxPlanet piece at http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6751/1/

The various add-on software one can use to secure networked multifunction systems with many (all?) of the above firewalls are Open Source as well. Examples of these are: - Firewall Builder (fwbuilder), http://www.fwbuilder.org/ BTW, good LXer writeup of Vadim Kurland's fwbuilder at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/116404 - Shorewall's IPTables/netfilter configuration software, http://www.shorewall.net/ - Several easier-to-use IPTables/netfilter config software such as KMyFirewall and Firestarter ; websites http://www.kmyfirewall.org/ and http://www.fs-security.com/ respectively - Intrusion Detection/Prevention software such as Snort and OSSEC; websites http://www.snort.org/ and http://www.ossec.net/ respectively --

On the one hand, two distinct advantages of Untangle's commercial Network Gateway product is that paid purchase of this grants one decent support (hopefully!) as well as greater ease in "managing your Internet experience" as Untangle claims. The latter advantage may well be worth the cost alone in terms of avoiding the inevitable frustrations involved in installing the firewall/router distro, upgrading and configuring this, and then applying security add-on software on top of these steps to harden the network.

OTOH, one clear advantage of using any the more than half-dozen firewall/router distros -- besides their free costs -- is that they all start on the low-end scale as far as hardware requirements. As an example here, the minimum required hardware for pfsense is

Quoting: CPU - 100 MHz Pentium RAM - 128 MB

Requirements specific to individual platforms follow.

Live CD CD-ROM drive USB flash drive or floppy drive to hold configuration file

Hard drive installation CD-ROM for initial installation 1 GB hard drive

Embedded 128 MB Compact Flash card Serial port for console

(from http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=vie...) Of course pfsense, like other router/firewall distros, can be scaled upwards depending upon the required network throughput and security features installed (see http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=vie...) Yet pfsense is still one of the the distros that has the highest minimum hardware reqs in the above Open Source router/firewall distros list! Compare this with Geier's description of the Untangle Network Gateway's minimum HW reqs of a generic Intel/AMD 800Mhz PC, 512MB of RAM, a bootable CD drive, a dedicated 20GB hard drive, and 2 Ethernet cards.

* The key point with the need for 512MB RAM and a dedicated 20GB hard drive is that the Untangle Network Gateway simply cannot easily make do on lesser hardware than this, as can the aforementioned Open Source router/firewall distros. Therefore, Untangle's Network Gateway commercial product may easily be considered superfluous for smaller SOHO and small business networks where server hardware is maxed-out, costs are absolutely paramount and there is already good in-house sysadmin F/OSS expertise.

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