[GRLUG] Firewall Distro

[Mike Williams]

Do you need a full PC distribution? Something like a Linksys WRT54GL can 
handle quite a bit. I have an old WRT54GS that has been happily running 
Tomato for many years with no problems.

Squid-cache might be a problem, but the higher-end routers have a USB 
port so you could hang an external hard drive off of it and put the 
cache there. The problem is likely that the more custom you get the less 
likely it is that you will be able to set it up via the web interface. 
Tomato has one in addition to SSH access, and a 54GL would have plenty 
of processor power to serve twenty users, but I don't know how hard it 
is to get squid going without setting it up at the command line.

Sadly, my PC-based firewall experience is woefully out of date since 
Tomato works so well. I used Smoothwall ages ago, and for a while I used 
a free-for-non-commercial-use package called Astaro. Both worked fine, 
and I really liked Astaro, but I don't even know if it exists anymore.

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.