Best Open Source Firewall

SoundsGood · 27 Jan 2012 at 13:57

What's the best open source firewall? Pfsense? Smoothwall?

This will be ran on a VM with 2 dedicated NICs if that makes any difference

SoundsGood · 27 Jan 2012 at 23:46

Looks like pfSense it is!

Would anyone be able to tell me how these solutions compare to off the shell ~£100 hardware solutions?

SoundsGood · 28 Jan 2012 at 01:43

Just curiosity really and it wont cost me anything to run a VM 24/7 as my server is already switched on.

At the moment I'm using IPSec to secure RDP but I have HTTP processes wide open

SoundsGood · 1 Feb 2012 at 22:02

I've tried both of them now, Smoothwall was the easiest to install due to the Hyper-V querks on pfsense, but pfsense seems to have far more options (except no Squid

) and pfsense doesn't randomly lose it's DHCP lease (like Smoothwall did).

I can see myself spending many hours tweaking this

SoundsGood · 2 Feb 2012 at 05:31

whitecrook said:
Im sure you can install squid on a pfsense box but I do remember reading it wasn't recommended or something. Why you using DHCP, surely your fw should be statically assigned it's ips

Yea it's probably not the best idea for security.. but I like the caching. DHCP was because it was on the DMZ and my public IP changes all the time

SoundsGood · 2 Feb 2012 at 05:32

ecksmen said:
How did you set it up on hyperv? I found that the internal clock would drift a lot - giving various errors and possibly why you're DHCP leases are expiring.

Smoothwall I'm sure has squid built in - but you can do a custom smoothy with the likes of dans guardian.

Hyperv: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=44568.0

The clock seems fine so far, apart from the logs being ~2 minutes in the past.

Smoothwall does have squid built in, but pfsense doesn't unfortunately