Comments on Clouded Security in IT: pfsense and Smoothwall

I've also been using pfSense for a good long time ...

2010-06-08T05:55:15.425+09:30

I've also been using pfSense for a good long time now. It does just about everything one could need, and without a price tag.

There are a few quirks with it in my set-up, but nothing too major, and support is very good on the forums. The only thing I could want more is a way to virtualize, but the pfSense community generally doesn't like the idea due to security concerns.

I've been using pfSense for about 6-months now on ...

2008-09-12T22:28:00.000+09:30

I've been using pfSense for about 6-months now on our production LAN (75ish users). I'd have to agree ian - pfSense is a really powerful solution, with an excellent community. Also - if you'd prefer to buy something that's supported, they also have commercial versions that have more or less been re-branded, but come with support. I've worked with both and am using pfSense 1.3-Alpha at home.

The only extra thing I would put in to the evaluat...

2008-09-06T23:02:00.000+09:30

The only extra thing I would put in to the evaluation criteria is community support. If you're going to use a 'free' system and rely on community support to help you out when things go pear shaped then you really will need this. I've just gone through the process of implementing my own homebuilt firewall and chose Smoothwall over similar competitors for this very reason. There is nothing worse than encountering issues and getting appeals for help ignored on the forums - or worse still, unhelpful replies saying STF!!!! (search the forum) when you've spent the last 24hrs doing just that.

Limiting yourself to the feature set in each of th...

2008-08-23T01:13:00.000+09:30

Limiting yourself to the feature set in each of these products seems unwise. Each is merely an administrative interface on top of native OS facilities and commonly used daemons. Why not spend a few days hacking on OpenBSD and call it good? openbsd+pf+bind+squid should do the trick.

If you are determined to use a bundled solution, pfsense is probably the way to go. pf is _far_ more powerful than stock iptables (or maybe you like patching netfilter and rebuilding kernel?).