The gift of volunteering

Dear Editor
 
I have been using windows for a number of years and am certified in
system administration. However when I became unemployed I thought this
was an opportunity to research Linux to see what I could use it for and
gain some skills to try to re-enter the labour market.
I needed to start gently with a GUI distro and found IPCop. I was
pleasantly surprised at how useful it is and the quality of the addons
and documentation. However having never been involved in the Open Source
community I did not really know what to expect in terms of support and
contribution to the community.
I continued to explore the Open Source community through IPCop and found
something quite unexpected. By reading the docmentation manuals and
implementing the services of the distro I really began to get an
appreciation of the high standard and professionalism of the work
countless volunteers had put in and this helped me develop an
understanding of what the Open Source community is really all about.
It was at this stage I noticed that a section of the documentation had
not be written up and when I enquired with the community what was
happening with it, I was invited by the Lead Documentation volunteer to
contribute. While still a Linux novice I thought that this would be an
ideal opportunity to learn more about the VPN features.
Through this activity I was able to learn more about system
administration than I did through certification because I found it an
enjoyable form of edu-tainment. I became introduced to other projects
and their developers from different parts of europe. I now regulary
beta test new versions of TauVPN and Linsys, which are Open Source
windows IPSec clients. I enjoyed this so much that I volunteered to
write up a how-to for TauVPN.
After responding to questions on the IPCop forums I noticed that users
were posting queries related to issues arising when using more than one
firewall and were trying to find firewalling technologies that were
complimentary to their IPCop or existing Router.
I started to explore other firewall distributions and firewall
technologies. I had become a CCNA in february of this year and this gave
me an understanding of switching and bridging so I was very interested
when I came across Linux bridging firewall technology. I signed up to
the ebtables mailing list and established that a Linux bridging firewall
can be very effective against attacks when configured without an IP
address. When further combined with an Intrusion Prevention System such
as snort-inline it can detect attacks and prevent them.
Having discovered this technology and how useful it would be to
compliment an existing firewall/router. I then went about researching
an easy to use GUI distro with these features and found distros for
nearly everything but no bridging firewall IPS distro. If anyone knows
of an easy to use GUI bridging firewall distro that I can install on a
older computer then I would appreciate details on it.
 
If there is none I would be interested in collaborating with
other volunteers in the development of an easy to use bridging firewall.
 
Christiaan Theron
christiaan@wonderport.com