Hello all,
I would love to hear someone's thoughts on the topic.

For many years I have run IPCop in front of my home LAN.
Having recently moved to another ISP, I am faced with either
re-banging my IPCop gateway/DHCPserver/Firewall machine, or
finding another solution: I am thinking of putting FireHOL on my
LAN clinets (have no server, etc.), and just letting the old IPCop
stay powered-down for now.

Surely, this is "sufficient" for a residential LAN?
I just wonder how the new ISP modem is going to weather the onslaught
of Chinese robots! One benefit of decommissioning my IPCop is the fact
that 35W of power suckage 24/7 just goes away...

I'm an IPSEC newbotron, I only once played at configuring iptables manually.
I've always relied on IPCop. Anyone think FireHOL is at least close to "on par"
in terms of straight "protection"?
Thank you!

IPCop is a Linux distribution firewall toolkit. It provides you with a Single Point of Failure (but OTOH network segmentation for DMZ and other uses, parental and other traffic filters etc, etc) while FireHOL (like a lot of tools like EFG, UFW, Arno, etc, etc) is "just" a frontend for iptables. So conceptually they're different beasts. The fact that you've never really "played" with iptables could be taken as an indication of something I probably shouldn't comment on as I personally choose to craft iptables rule sets by hand. Given the fact that FireHOL has been around for ages and is still actively maintained could mean it's an OK product to use, OTOH rule sets aren't that hard to create (and check!) so why not give it a try?..

2 million other things to do afk. Some day, *sigh*
So, aside from IPCop's wonderful feature set, it's basically doing the same thing as FireHOL in terms of iptables and firewalling right? (OK, not the exact same thing, they probably have different rules sets, etc.).

Surely you'll prioritize things differently when you encounter problems :-]


Sure.