Best firewall gateway version of Linux ?

Alex Satrapa grail at goldweb.com.au
Mon Jan 21 11:09:07 EST 2002


On Monday, January 21, 2002, at 10:49 , Bob Edwards wrote:

> Martin Schwenke wrote:
>> We're talking about configuring a firewall here aren't we?  I would
>> have thought the last thing you would want running on your firewall is
>> a web-based service that lets you configure the machine/firewall...

SmoothWall has always used a web-based configuration tool.

> I still prefer the command-line, accessible by SSH from at least the 
> inside
> network.

Webmin allows a web-based interface for configuring common options for 
most packages, while a command line interface through SSH can still be 
used by people who feel more comfortable with that environment.  Note 
that running Webmin on a Debian system means that you can administer the 
system like a normal Debian box - as opposed to SmoothWall, which causes 
grief to any sysadmin who I've ever seen attempt to "tune" SmoothWall 
from the CLI.

If you're totally paranoid, you probably wouldn't want to run services 
on an internally accessible interface (after all, dumb users can be just 
as dangerous as script kiddies - or worse).  At that point, you would 
probably not want to use SmoothWall either.

I'm not that paranoid, wrt my home network.

Alex





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