[clug] Home Firewall dedicated OS

[Robert Thorsby]

On 26/08/09 14:13:05, Ian McLeod wrote:
> Seems a better solution to set up home VPN
> is to bridge the modem to a dedicated OS..

> Seems there is SmoothWall and ClarkConnect
> free editions and something called Devil Linux..
> 
> Any experience with these things?

There are a plethora of specialist firewall distros. Virtually all work 
as good as, or better than, their most expensive proprietary 
counterparts.

To give you an idea of how robust these f/w distros are, I have been 
using IPCop for about a decade now to protect my SOHO LAN. My f/w 
usually runs 24/7, and here on the coast the salt air plays havoc with 
electronics.

I have had two catastrophic hardware failures on my f/w. The first was 
a total HDD failure -- I didn't realise that it was no longer spinning 
for about 3 days, until I decided one day to have a look at the logs. 
IPCop was still running as sweetly as usual (but, of course, was not 
writing to logs).

On the second occasion, one of my RAM slots completely corroded out. On 
this occasion the computer, and thus IPCop, stopped running. I tried 
removing the offending RAM and running on the remaining half but when I 
investigated I found that the second slot was also badly corroded. In 
this case, IPCop had run while ever it had a computer under it.

My f/w is now a sealed unit without a HDD. I no longer have any f/w 
problems.

Cheers,
Robert Thorsby
... Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to 
everybody is the "most reliable Windows ever". To me, this  is like 
saying that asparagus is "the most articulate vegetable ever".
		-- Dave Barry