Open Source Corporate Firewall

[velkymx]

This weekend we had a major outage at my work. Seems that the server room AC unit decided not to turn on. That in turn raise the temperature to over 100 degrees! Needless to say, more than one server went offline. While that in and of itself destroyed my weekend, it was the firewall?s demise that has really thrown a wrench into the works.

A little background? we currently run both a corporate network of around 50 users, plus we have a couple of web servers, a database server and of course an Exchange server. All of this sat behind a SonicWall TZ170 firewall.

Don?t get me wrong here, the SonicWall is a ok solution for a firewall, and it has some interesting protection features, but to completely fail on me because of overheating seems a bit of a problem. Tech support tells me that the heat from the room has cause a major failure in the LAN ports of the firewall. So instead of it being a traffic firewall it back just a traffic wall stopping both incoming and outgoing traffic.

So after getting off of the phone with them on Sunday afternoon. Having been told I need to purchase a whole new unit ? which would take a couple of days to get ? and being with out the entire network I was more than a little concerned. So what did I do?

I know that I need the following features to work:

* Traffic Routing

* DHCP

* VPN

Like any good internet junkie I turned to Google. I did a quick search for firewall routers and came up with an assorted list of possible replacements. From DLink to Linksys to Symantec ? everyone seemed to be in the market. Only problem was each would take days to get and the cheapest would run the company just over $300. To put that into perspective the most expensive of ones with the features I needed was $6,800.

So I modified my search to include open source projects. Right away I got a number of Linux alternatives. High on the list was one that was a little familiar ? I remember reading an article about this great little firewall called IPCop.

Now let me just get out of the way how easy this thing was to get up and running. The solution took under an hour to get entirely setup, as apposed to the over 8 hours I spent on the SonicWall ? and over that on the old Symantec I had before that.

Complete Review: http://www.synergymx.com/stuff_detail.asp?ID=89