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Review: SmoothWall Express 2.0 (NewsForge)

[Posted March 10, 2005 by cook]

NewsForge reviews SmoothWall Express 2.0. "In these days of always-on Internet connections, a firewall that protects your network from unauthorized access is indispensable. Though most home routers have some sort of basic firewall capabilities, their rules for incoming and outgoing traffic are often basic and arbitrary. An alternative is to run a Linux-based firewall on old hardware, but configuring this sort of setup is generally not easy. An exception is SmoothWall, a free application you can install on any old machine to convert it to a dedicated hardware firewall. SmoothWall has a friendly interface and more configuration options than standard hardware firewalls."

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Posted Mar 11, 2005 15:45 UTC (Fri) by dlapine (subscriber, #7358) [Link]

Hmmm, Please note that Smoothwall seems to be designed to reuse an old box as more fully featured firewall. "The installation is easy, thanks to the excellent documentation provided. During the installation, SmoothWall formats the hard drive, with no options to save any data or make custom partitions"

If you just want to add a firewall to an existing box, but aren't happy editing iptables rules directly, try http://pfilter.sourceforge.net/.