I'm thinking of setting up smoothwall as a firewall on my small home network because I could be getting ADSL soon. Is smoothwall a any good firewall?

Smoothwall?

Moved here

I've never used it myself, but I know quite a few people who are happy with it. I suppose the only way to find out if you like it is to try it

Smoothwall Express 2 tested on Tomshardware:
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-178-...-SMOOTHWALL.php

It's great and easy to setup.
If you don't need many features it's great.

If you do want the extra's try IPCOP : http://www.ipcop.org/

We use it as the firewall in many schools and businesses and even in our own office. It's an excellent firewall and won't give you any problems. I haven't heard of anyone using it at home yet, although I have thought of doing it myself. The only reason I haven't is that I don't want to give up a PC to do it.

I've stuck to shorewall for quite awhile, but that does look quite promising and very user friendly.

I was only able to see the Web Interface. The server being a crappy Dell Optiplex Gs P166.

It's looks pretty simple to configure.

Consider IPcop.

It's a stand alone distro that provides firewalling, web proxy (some limitations to it, though, from my experience) and a vpn endpoint. It's pretty simple to use, and it's web interface is _much_ better than those offered by several commercial routers.

Their support system is top-notch. While more of a mailing-list type of guy myself, their boards contain a wealth of info from experienced gurus. Don't ignore the documentation, though; the author(s) put a lot of effort into 'em for your perusal.

I admin smoothwall boxes for a few business's, it is a pretty good distro, lots of extensibility be sure to check out the smoothwall forums for addons.

Smoothwall is good. I would highly recommend it. (but to be fair, I haven't tried the competition out). Really good to have a standalone firewall outside of the soft-firewall on your computer. It is even better to have 2 firewalls that are on 2 completely different operating systems.

Besides firewall, Smoothwall is also good at: DHCP Serving (with a static MAC address table) and VPN Serving. I think you can also configure it to accept dial-up connections, but I haven't played around with it. It has a really slick web interface, and you can even get to a shell with a java applet it comes with on the page. Really easy to setup.

Smoothwall is cool enough, it works very well. Another one to take a look at is monowall: http://m0n0.ch/wall/ , which personally prefer.

m0n0wall is better imo

Did install at home and didn't work for me. Sorry! I stick with my software firewall for now....

I used Smoothwall a couple years ago and it was great. I switched to Astaro because it has caching. (DNS and HTTP) Astaro also has a VPN server and can be setup as an endpoint.

Astaro free for home use is restricted to 10 hosts though. The pay version brings web and mail virus filtering.

Astaro has steeper sys req than Smoothwall but I'v been using it on an old dual proc P3 Dell workstation for some time and its rock solid.


This IPcop looks pretty good. I can't find a list on their site of what services it uses. It appears to do webcaching with SQUID but what about a DNS cache? Anything else?

Traffic shaping looks cool.


**mOnOwall looks way more impressive than it used to, also. I may have to switch over to it.

wow thanks for the link is very useful for me thanks a lot

m0n0wall is much better than smoothwall in my opinion. It's faster, uses considerably less disk space (like 8mb or so, I forget the exact figure), and it has more features. I'd highly recommend checking it out.

http://m0n0.ch/wall/