[NOS2Go4Me]

Seriously, if you're not gonna contribute meaningfully, STFU. I'm sick of it lately around here.

Anywho... the geeks among us, especially the Linux ones, are likely aware of SmoothWall. It has to be one of the best, Linux-as-true-firewall distros out there.

I had 2.0 for quite some time, found it great except for the raging memory leaks after a few weeks of uptime.

I saw 3.0 come out last year and figured... "nah, I'll wait for a bit". Now it's re-released with SP1, a collection of major and minor fixes.

I installed it on my trusty Dimension L667r - Pentium III 667MHz, 256MB RAM, 80GB ATA133 HDD, 2 x 3COM 905-class network cards.

The install was quick (but it's not a big distro... under 100MB image file for the CD), the config was even less painful than 2.0 and 2.0 was cake. The hardest part was remembering which NIC had which MAC address. Cracking the case during install solves that problem. :P

It's now up and running and is even more transparent than 2.0. You'd almost swear you were connected directly to the Internet. It's that fast. I've attached a screenshot of the real-time, auto-adjusting bandwidth monitor screen. They sure as hell didn't have that in 2.0!



Now you can see which one of your roommates is Bogarting all the bandwidth. ;)

I've only had it up and running today, but I'm impressed. I'll post up more impressions next week.

[NefCanuck]

Very nice and one of the things that I do envy the *nix camp for. Software that works without the major drama.

In comparison I just upgraded my home box & 'top to ESET 4.0 security suite 64bit. So far I'm one of the lucky ones where everything works but their support forum is riddled with users experiencing random 'net connection losses with zero explanation from the vendor <_<

NefCanuck

[hardk0re]

very nice stuff.

btw: windows home server is pretty awsome stuff too for those of us that like stuff that "just works".

[reldridge]

Hey, I've got one of those Dells taking up space in my basement... Now I have a use for it!

Cheaper than buying a Netscreen or an SSG 5 (I had a week long Juniper course a few weeks back).

Ryan

[DD1]

The original poster asked for no threadcrapping thanks.

[Canadian ST]

The original poster asked for no threadcrapping thanks.

[NOS2Go4Me]

Uhm, mod cleanup in aisle 5?

Kev - I've always wanted to try out Home Server, but I've never gotten around to it. I'm going to be re-building another box at home and trying FreeNAS on it as a free alternative to Home Server. It's something else that's geared more to tech pros than home users, for sure, but I don't feel like shelling out on MS licensing. :)

Daniel - ESET? Linkage?

Ryan - SmoothWall is great on anything from what I have, on up. A lot of guys get away with Mendocino-class Celerons and other P2-style architecture, but I'm not willing to go that low. Coppermine P3s are great for this setup. They're efficient in their design and performance. Also, if I can find a bit more RAM I'll throw some in. I'd rather have 512MB because I like overkill. :)

If anyone starts messing with it and has any questions, let me know. I've been using SmoothWall for a while now. :)

[NefCanuck]

Eset Smart Security - http://www.eset.com

They offer a 30 day trial of their software, fully functional for the duration.

NefCanuck

[Aka]

I've messed with FreeNAS and Smoothwall a bit. But I have a Linksys RV042 for my dual wan and it's good enough, but sure not a true firewall.

FreeNAS was strange, it supports software RAID so far as I know, but I could never get it implimented right, I was trying to do software RAID5. I didn't much care about the performance hit that would cause. This was off course a year ago? and I didn't know much BSD/Linux at the time (nor now, but i know more now than I did then).

[paolo]

very nice. i love the bandwidth bars screen shot.
its very usefull.

[NOS2Go4Me]

Kev - have you tried re-imaging a home computer with the WHS image backup/restore software? I'd be interested in hearing about how well/poorly this works.

[ANTHONYD]

The OS that comes with my computer "just works" too.

:lol:

[NOS2Go4Me]

ANTHONYD,Mar 23 2009, 09:48 AM Wrote:The OS that comes with my computer "just works" too.

:lol:
[right][snapback]283229[/snapback][/right]

Yeah, but this isn't "an OS", per se. This is a firewall OS, a larger, grander and neater way of doing with old hardware as opposed to the generic, low-rent network router that some 18-year old wanna-be hack will sell you at Best Buy. It's also a lot more robust than 99.9% of those pieces of hardware, will support more traffic and users and even lets you see if there's an "incident" on your network where one or more computers are hogging your bandwidth. You can even see what kind of traffic it is. It's great if you start rolling them out for friends and family that you manage the computers for, anyways, as they're universal in their performance and you can help parents keep tabs on what their kids are doing... independent of the OS on the client computer ;) It can see what your Mac is doing, just the same as the Windows desktop and the Linux laptop.

The irony of the matter is that if you're the kind of person that builds these systems, you probably don't need to worry about your own network very much (unless you're deploying it at a SMB).

Apples and oranges in this case, bud. :) It doesn't even support a true desktop session OOTB. Kinda negates the whole purpose. You don't surf directly from your wireless router, do you? :)