Linux router/UTM distros.

[YeOldeStonecat]

As a small business network consultant...over the years it's become apparent the increasing need for something with more features than just an entry level biz grade NAT box for the small business. Many of my clients run on Small Business Server, or several servers including Exchange. With ad/malware on the increase, as well as SPAM...it's nice to have an added layer of protection done at the gateway.

Years ago I began piddling with some of the linux distros out there...and there's a lot..here's a list that certainly does not include all of them.

Some of the basic *nix router distros....

IPCop...one of the more popular ones, has a big development/support community with lots of add-on packages.
http://www.ipcop.org/
You can add UTM functionality to it with the add-on called Copfilter
http://www.copfilter.org/

m0n0wall
http://m0n0.ch/wall/

Smoothwall
http://www.smoothwall.org/

pfSense...built on m0n0wall...with stronger QoS features
http://www.pfsense.com/

Clark Connect is a cool distro for a small business, sort of an open source *nix version of Microsoft Small Business Server
http://www.clarkconnect.com/

vyatta
http://www.vyatta.com/

For some of the UTM distros....in addition to the Copfilter build of IPCop listed above....

Endian...one of my favorites..built on top of IPCop..with the features of Copfilter...bundled into one tight package
http://www.endian.com/en/community/

Comixwall
http://comixwall.org/

Astaro
http://www.astaro.com/

Untangle...this one is fantastic...I've built a few...using them in production...very powerful. Lots of features...even blocking of IM traffic and peer to peer traffic.
http://www.untangle.com/

eBox
http://ebox-platform.com/
Similar to ClarkConnect...quasi server duties

So in this thread...maybe some of us who have experienc with some of these can start conversations.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

So...after getting into some of the basic distros..IPCop, m0n0wall, Smoothwall, PFSense.....I discovered an add-on for IPCop..called "Copfilter". This brings some "UTM" functionality to it.

Soon after that...I stumbled across a disto called "Endian"...which is basically a groomed version of IPCop w/Copfilter built into it. I used with with success at a couple of clients even...helping out their Exchange server...removing spam.

Last year I came across a fantastic distro....Untangle.
WOW! Trial version at a client of mine...it's excellent. Very feature rich. The list of features if very lengthy. Because of this...all the features it can run...yes it does need some horsepower to run on, it won't be like the others and be able to run on some old leftover P2 box.

I also recently revisited PFSense...in a search for improving QoS. Last year I moved from a town where I enjoyed the near 30 meg speeds of Comcast Powerboost..to a town with a small cable ISP where I had to get used to slowing down to 6 megs again. With a teenage boy who loves to online game even more than I do, Vonage phone service, my frequent VPN needs and online gaming, and a wife that does a lot of online work....that 6 megs gets tight, and the phone quality gets choppy. So I took an old IBM Thinkpad T22 I had kicking around, old P3 800 something w/256 megs, and installed PFSense again. I had tried it years ago when it first came out..was buggy. They recently released 1.2 version this past Feb. Pre-canned Traffic Shaping settings for the popular VoIP products including Vonage...flipped that on. I gave P2P traffic the lowest background priority, and it came with pre-canned QoS settings for popular online games..which I enabled for BF2 and COD.

Now...informal testing time. Removed my RV082..replaced with laptop w/PFSense. Began download of 3 huge files at the same time. By themselves....combined with fully pegged my 6 meg connection looking at the PFSense traffic chart. I then brought up Firefox..and began visiting my common forums. Normally on just a plain router...the web browsing would be slower..choppy. But nope..smooth as butter. I then fired up Battlefield 2..and went to my usual server. On just a plain router..my pings would have been all over the place..but with PFSense...while my massive downloads were still coming down...it played smooth as butter. The boy and wife were still surfing away smoothly. System performance of my old P3 Thinkpad doing all of this...CPU utilization peaked at only 30% or so.

At the office we have an RV016...I had built a full time IPSec tunnel with my RV082 from home to the office..so I could RDP to my workstation and servers. The PFSense box, with its built in IPSec VPN service, was quickly able to reproduce that...tunnel ran fine.