Re: Need secure firewall for SOHO

[Paul O'Malley <ompaul () eircom net>]

DAmbrosia, Jim wrote:

> To the group,
>
> I have a colleague who has a SOHO network using ADSL.  He is using a standard Linksys router for his firewall, but has reached a limit in the number of ports it can open and manage.  I don't have one on hand to check, but evidently the Linksys only has ten slots to configure ports to be opened and he needs 12-15 or so.  
>
> Without a lot of money he wants to get a different firewall up and running that has more ports that it can manage.  
> I suggested the free version of zone alarm as the only free one I'm aware of; however it turns out that he wrote his thesis on how you can crack zone alarm.
>
> Looking for another much more secure solution?
>  
Hi,

you could try:

a bare bones PC a few nic cards no monitor no keyboard no mouse putty on 
a windows box and:

cheap and cheerful GNU/Linux box with iptables

or

cheap and cheerful FreeBSD box with ipfw

or if you must

cheap and cheerful openbsd box

or you get the idea

open the linksys to bridge if you really have to the new FW.

Return to a less interesting project.

Regards,

Paul O'Malley