Home Network Firewalls
While there are quite a variety of commercial products available for securing your home network, most do not allow detailed configure the security rules and depend greatly on simple network address translation (NAT). In addition, many home users have very old computers (386, 486 or pentium) machines gathering dust. Enter, various Linux firewall implementations. Dachstein has run for several years on an old Pentium PC without HD! Some firewalls have run continuously running for a year without rebooting!! Though these Linux firewalls have had (and continue to have) excellent success, this software approach isn’t for everyone. Configuration and documentation have been somewhat lacking.
Well, this has changed with the availability of IPCop. What is IPCop?
UPDATE 4/2019 – IT APPEARS IPCOP IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE! However, there are a number of free alternatives. If you are looking for a free firewall you can give this web site a lookfor many Windows -based firewalls
https://www.comparitech.com/antivirus/best-free-firewalls/
Or this site for Linux-based firewalls
https://www.techradar.com/news/best-free-linux-firewall
The IPCop project was a GNU/GPL project that offers an exceptional feature packed stand alone firewall to the internet community. Its comprehensive web interface, well documented administration guides, and its involved and helpful user/administrative mailing lists make users of any technical capacity feel at home. It goes far beyond a simple ipchains / netfilter implementation available in most Linux distributions and even the firewall feature sets of commercial competitors.
IPCop installation generally runs 25 minutes, and you can complete it with relatively modest hardware requirements such as a 386 processor with 32MB RAM and >300MB of disk, and 3 Network Cards (2 if there is no need for a DMZ). If you plan to utilize caching proxy, IDS or other add-ons, consider additional horsepower in terms of RAM/Processor.
Bottomline, there is no reason (or excuse) to risk your home computer security with excellent free firewall implementations available today.
Posted: March 14th, 2006 under General.
Tags: firewall, home_network, IPCop, linux_firewall