[K12OSN] Firewall

[Jeff Kinz]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 03:57:28PM -0500, Mark Cockrell wrote:
> This may be a bit off topic, and if so I apologize for that.  Our school 
> is currently running a proprietary firewall, and it's no longer meeting 
> out needs.  I'd like to upgrade but, naturally, have very little in the 
> way of budget.  Can anyone recommend a solid firewall that provides 
> stateful packet inspection, VPNs, IP Tunnels, multiple IP aliases and 
> inbound and outbound packet filtering for about 500 -1000 concurrent 
> connections?  And, of course, if it's Free and Open Source, so much the 
> better.  I'm not asking for much, am I?

Hi Mark, Many commercial firewall appliances are simply Linux installed
in a small box, running IPTables with some smart scripting around it, so
yes, you can build a "nearly free" Linux based firewall system that will
do all the things you mentioned above.

Two Linux distros designed to do this, that I can think of off the top 
of my head are "ipcop' and "smoothwall"

http://www.ipcop.org/
http://www.smoothwall.org/


I'm sure there are others as well.

> 
-- 
Linux/Open Source.  Now all your base belongs to you, for free.
============================================================
Idealism:  "Realism applied over a longer time period"

Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.