Protecting Networks With SmoothWall Express
Dec 12, 2008, 20:01 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Joseph R. Baxter)
"SmoothWall Express 3.0, from August 2007, is an open source
firewall distribution released under the GNU General Public License
(GPL). It provides all the features commonly found in a modern
system, but also a few that you might not expect. Stateful
inspection, dynamic and static NAT, egress controls, demilitarized
zone (DMZ) segmentation, and a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
(DHCP) server are de rigueur in today's world. However, this
package adds a selection of proxy servers for the Web (content
filtering is available in the commercial editions), POP3 mail,
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Domain Name System (DNS), and
instant messaging. You can configure the proxies to further protect
networks with antivirus scanning and forensic logging, and Snort
intrusion-detection software is built in for logging suspicious
events. However, real-time alerting via email or SMS text messages
is not available on the Express version. SmoothWall also features a
simple quality of service (QoS) management that business and home
users alike should find valuable.
"With a free registered account, you can access my.SmoothWall, a
hosted service that collects data on firewall specs, chipsets, and
more. A world map plots the data, allowing you to anonymously view
listings of hardware in use throughout the world. They have titled
the beta my.SmoothWall Web site Firewall Management, but it is
unclear how extensive this management will be in the final version.
It might become a comprehensive set of tools like those that
service providers on the SonicWALL platform use to administrate
multiple customers; or it might remain only a place for update
notifications and deployment data. In either case, this level of
integration to the vendor Web site is almost unknown among open
source firewalls."
Complete
Story
Related Stories:
