Building a firewall
Apr0
Yesterday I spent a few hours building a mini pc to run a popular firewall product by Astaro. Their security gateway is a lot more than just a firewall as it can handle almost any networking task you throw at it. It does everything from load balancing to virus scanning your traffic. I found the level of control to be quite amazing with a fairly minimal impact on traffic speeds in general.
The hardware specifications I used for this are right here:
Motherboard: Intel BOXD945GCLF2 (includes dual core atom processor)
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE 80GB SATA 7200RPM
Additional Network Card: D-LINK DFE-538TX
My conclusion of testing this product has been that overall it is the best linux based gateway security product I’ve ever seen. After running into issues with running my torrents and streaming media I decided not to use this product directly in front of all my home PCs because it is too much an inconvenience for myself. I really can’t stand having any slow downs or extra hassle setting up network rules to allow my programs to communicate outside my home network. The one thing that almost made me keep it was all the detailed reports on who is using bandwidth and where they are using it and over what port etc. To sum things up, this product was designed with an office in mind and not suited to my home use. When I’m bashing some zombies in Left 4 Dead or fragging some n00bs in Counter Strike I can’t have any lag and well this product just isn’t for me. I’m going to keep the security gateway installed on my mini pc so I can do some more testing and learn all of the features of this product but it simply does too good of a job blocking everything by default. I was able to get torrents and remote desktop to work from outside the network but I more so saw it as too much effort for the amount of time I want to spend configuring and maintaining my home network.