Best firewall gateway version of Linux ?

[Alex Satrapa]

On Thursday, January 17, 2002, at 08:24 , Richard Cottrill wrote:

> NBH - 'Not Built Here'

> On Wednesday, January 16, 2002, at 11:17 , Richard Cottrill wrote:
>>
>>> I'm pretty sure that all of the problems with Smoothwall that you've
>>> mentioned no longer exist. I suspect the NBH syndrome.

I was content with the services that Smoothwall GPL did provide (ie: 
nothing), but the one thing I really wanted was the ability to SSH in 
from outside.  I already had the tunnelling solution (PPP over SSH - 
yeckk).

I kept monitoring the SmoothWall GPL web site, but there was no action - 
just lots of boasting of how many billions of copies had been 
downloaded.  So I spent a day pulling apart the web pages, and ported 
them across to a Debian box - there's a bit more involved than just 
calling pon/poff :)

Now the big feature that I'm looking for is resilience against being 
switched off without being shut down.  I think I can do this with my 
existing setup by switching to EXT3 or ReiserFS or whatever.  And 
possibly seeing how much I can split the file system into "read only" 
and "don't care" partitions.  Then figuring out how to convince fsck 
that when I say "answer yes to all questions", I *mean* "answer yes to 
all questions" - not just "answer yes to all questions except the ones 
where there's a choice between yes or no".

The friends I've installed the old smoothwall box for have a habit of 
unplugging it to plug in guitar amps, vacuum cleaners, disco lights... 
whatever.

"Not Invented Here" was the least of my worries.  I *wanted* to use a 
prepackaged firewall product, but none of the ones I found at the time 
were any good for what I wanted to do.

Anyhow, at the time of writing, I can't go off to research the latest 
version of SmoothWall GPL or IPcop, because Telstra's ADSL network is in 
its usual state.

Regards
Alex