Hi there everyone,

I am a relative newbie to linux but my experiences so far have been great. I have been running a red hat file server and an IP cop firewall for a couple of years now and they are wonderful.

I am moving factory in a month and thought it would be a good time to but the business (read: my new toy ) a 19" rackmount for servers, telephones etc...

Ip cop has been great as a firewall 100% reliable and straight forward to use. Now that I am moving I have decided that I need to restrict access to the internet from specific (most) machines on the network. The problem is that I will not always be here to configure the system (and I am not that good with config files and scripts) so I need something with a nice GUI. I was looking at getting two machines one with a firewall either IP cop or Devil-linux and another for content filtering and access restriction possibly censornet but that is twice as many machines, network cards etc... to go wrong.

Does anyone know of a good linux distro or add on for a distribution that will act as both a firwall, DHCP server and content/access filter that is simple to use?

Thanks in advance for any help...

Alex

If you liked IPCop, you will dump it quickly for ClarkConnect.
Check it out

google for clarkconnect

I would post the links to the site and the iso but this is my first post here and url linking is disabled

Looks interesting thanks. The reviews are really encouraging and it seems to have most of the features I am after.

Slightly pricier than the FREE I was hoping for but then I guess you pay for the convenience!

Most distros will be pretty good but I can *strongly* recommend using DansGuardian for your content filter. I am very happy with its performance and customizability. It was the best one that I could find when I was last looking at content filters - it allowed the most good through while keeping the bad out.

clarkconnect home edition is free!
It uses dans guardian and privoxy as content filters.

But I ain't no "home" user!

Yea- I understand. Im not either.
Trust me - Home edition is all you need.
You asked for opinions - take it or leave it.

Is it not limited to 5 users?

i have 25 on mine

Cool, I will give it a trial and see how I go. Thanks for the suggestion.

Why not just install the IPCop add-ons? They can do what you're asking.

ipcop quickly becomes unstable and full of holes with the add-ons

I've been running the add-ons stable for about 3 months now. I did expereince some freezing and crashing, but I changed hardware and haven't had a problem since. I think it's the best free solution out there if you don't want to configure everything from scratch.

Freezing and crashing-- typical
I used to think IpCop was the best too until I tried ClarkConnect