M0n0wall

[desnudopenguino]

http://m0n0.ch/wall/
Has anybody used it? Any good/bad experiences?

It looks like a good, free, piece of software built on FreeBSD (which I am quite familiar with) for configuring a router/firewall.

I plan on trying it out on an old Pentium III box with 1 GB of ram, no hard drive and 4 NICs. I'll post some results later!

[ben0]

I've never actually used monowall, but I've used others very similar. If you get bored or fancy a change try smoothwall, pfsense, clearOS or ipcop. ;-)

[noroger]

I've never actually used monowall, but I've used others very similar. If you get bored or fancy a change try smoothwall, pfsense, clearOS or ipcop. ;-)

Add Untangle to the list (also can be used as a router). It also packs some extra goodies as well, like virus blocker, spyware blocker, ad blocker etc. Check it out.

[rogard]

monowall is only really great for embedded devices. if you have any storage use pfsense its a fork of monowall and has waaay more/better features.

[damha]

Since we are on the topic, I am interested in running a bunch of stuff at home and pfsense is one of them. The only thing scaring me is latencies for gaming.

Have you done any testing rogard with pfsense and latency/bandwidth performance?

[noroger]

I know the post was directed towards rogard, but I still want to share my experiences in case someone else is wondering the same thing.

I'm running Untangle at home on a P4 2.8GHz, 1GB ram, 40GB HDD IDE machine with phish, spyware, virus blocker as well as intrusion prevention and firewall running.
All I play these days is Counter-Strike Source (FPS) and I constantly see my latency on the bottom right of the screen by the help of a simple command. I never had any problems with Untangle while playing CSS, maybe a 1-3ms increase, can't notice it When someone else in the house starts watching lets say a youtube video, my latency bumps up from ~50ms to 100ms for about 5 seconds and then goes back down to ~55ms - I'm guessing QoS kicks in.

Untangle is different from Pf Sense. Untangle is more resource hungry depending which services are running. Since Pf Sense is more light weight I don't think you will run into ANY latency problems. Now about the bandwidth - if you're running a fast connection like the one in your sig, a simple Pentium 2 computer won't do the job. Faster the hardware = faster it can process the packets.

[Biznatch]

I have been using PFSense as my router/firewall for a couple years now. Its definitely faster/more powerful than any consumer router you can buy, by a large amount. I had it running on an old athlon 1700 with 512meg of ram, now it's on a mini itx w/ intel t2500 along with 1536MB of ram with 3gig nics. Any latency I have comes from my crappy ISP. If you look, there are companies that sell it as a commercial firewall on their rack mount hardware.

[rogard]

Since we are on the topic, I am interested in running a bunch of stuff at home and pfsense is one of them. The only thing scaring me is latencies for gaming.

Have you done any testing rogard with pfsense and latency/bandwidth performance?

pfsense adds less than 1ms even when pushing over 1Gbps through it..and thats running in a VM.

Make sure you have nice nics (intel e1000) and you have enough cpu and you will be fine.

[OldChap]

Another vote here for PFSense I am currently trialling it and have never had any issues even when I was running as 3 separate lans bridged together.... and I haven't scratched the surface of all the features it has

[youngpro]

i vote for something like redhat enterprise or something open source maybe gentoo or debian with iptables..

if you want speed, build you own iptables up from the ground with the modules you want loaded, and as rogard said of course use quality NICs

[desnudopenguino]

Thanks for the input guys! I will be sure to check out pfsense as well.

[damha]

Not going to hijack your thread desnudo, but thanks to all the guys who responded. This is very encouraging, I am going to build a new rig just for this now.

[desnudopenguino]

Not going to hijack your thread desnudo, but thanks to all the guys who responded. This is very encouraging, I am going to build a new rig just for this now.

Haha, it's cool dude! I have been interested in doing something like this for a while and didn't see anything on here, so I thought it would be good to start a thread about making old hardware into a firewall and see what people suggested, since I am a fiend for keeping old stuff around for a while and this is a good way to re-purpose it.