[K12OSN] Firewall

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 15:57, 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?

*Any* current Linux distribution can do all of that for free.  The hard
part is deciding what to delete to make it just a firewall.  If you want
to run ftp/http servers and/or squid on the same box, look at what used
to be the e-smith server. The free, unsupported version is now at
http://www.contribs.org and a commercial version supported by Mitel is
at http://www.e-smith.com.

If you just want a firewall you could use the floppy based Coyote Linux
(http://www.coyotelinux.com/) or the commercial wolverine version from
the same place.  Or there's the free run-from-cd firewall from
http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com