A linux distro that ...well...."Poor mans Small Business Server"

[YeOldeStonecat]

Some readers here may recall I'm a fan of trying out various linux distributions that run as your firewall, I find them usually vastly superior to "off the shelf" home grade products, and even most biz grade products.

Over the past several months I've been thinking about trying out a relatively new product called ClearOS, which is a branch off of an existing product called ClarkConnect.


http://www.clearfoundation.com/
List of features
http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html

As you can see, the list of features that is has is quite impressive, this 1 product could fit in most of the categories of this forum...LAN/WAN/router/security/NAS/VPN.

So this weekend I retired my long time trusty IBM Thinkpad running pfSense, I assembled some old components I had laying around...an old Asus P4C800 with an Intel P4 h/t 3.0, couple of gigs of RAM, several old hard drives, couple of extra NICs...and built an ESXi host (going with this so I can more easily try new distros down the road...normally you'd install a distro like ClearOS on its own).

Very impressed with this product. I'd call it a "poor mans Small Business Server". Firewall duties including QoS, web server, file server, print server, e-mail server, FTP server, VPN support, some UTM features.

I encourage some "do it yourselfers" to check it out.

 

[thiggins]

Yeolde, have you seen this one?
http://www.ebox-technologies.com/

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I have Tim, from what I've seen out there..it seems to be the only other "similar" product. Last year I downloaded it but never got around to installing it, I may give it a shot soon now that I have the ESXi running as my playground.

 

[eon]

Eon

YeOldeStonecat,

Feel free to give EON a try, it will offer you ZFS enterprise grade storage features and for firewall features IPF, which is very similar to the rule syntax in pfsense (IIRC).

http://eonstorage.blogspot.com/
http://sites.google.com/site/eonstorage/

 

[bnborg]

Cool!

I am downloading version 5.2.

I looked at the documentation, but nowhere did I find anything about which specific processors it has been tested with.