OSNews: Review: Smoothwall Express 2.0 Final

“For those that don’t already know, smoothwall is a very slick
and easy way to setup a firewall/nat/dhcp server (and more) at home
or in a small office very quickly even on old computer equipment. I
have used Smoothwall 1.0 in the past and liked its features
(although at the time, I did have a problem with Snort failing to
start after I updated the software with some fixes…). It served
on an old Pentium II 400mhz machine with two NICs inside (network
cards). One was the ‘green’ interface (more about that later) and
the other was the ‘red’ interface. I used that setup for quite a
few months, mainly because I wanted to see what alternatives there
were to hardware based firewalls (such as DLink gateways/firewalls)
that I had been using.

“Why did I decide to give Smoothwall a chance? well quite
simply, my dlink firewall/nat/simple router couldnt handle large
traffic, and when confronted with that, would die, stone dead and
the only way to fix it was to disconnect the power from it and
restart. That’s just about ok if you are beside it, but if you are
in Ireland (which I was) and it is in Sweden, then whatever you are
hosting is down for as long as you are away.

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