Hey!

I have an old pentium 3 lying around and i thought i could make some good use of it by turning it into an antivirus/firewall gateway machine. Considering Vista's kernel protection, and its finished RTM copy, such a security gateway might become very useful in the near future...

So my question is what do you guys suggest as a good distro or distro+package to put in between the net and my LAN which should takeover the role of antivirus scanning and firewalling (for infections coming from the internet side)?

Oh and this should preferably be a transparent solution... (but i guess connecting to the net through a proxy running on the gateway should also work as a last resort)...

thx ahead guys!

i'd point you towards ipcop. probably also want the advproxy addons for it to get proper av scanning, url filters and such

why cant we go for iptables... it is better than ipcop rite...

iptables is only a configuration tool for netfilter (the linux firewall)... ipcop, on the other hand, is a complete gateway/firewall distro with all sorts of packages (including iptables)... so it's like comparing apples to oranges...

i thought iptables was an integral part of linux networking... but anyways, that just serves as a firewall (n my router can do that), what i need is virus scanning...

any other suggestions? what u think of astaro?

ipcop (suggested by acid_kewpie) and astaro both seem like two good options for you to test... there's also other, of course - but this is a good start IMHO...

I checked out IPcop, but it doesnt have (builtin) antivirus scanning...

any suggestions regarding antivirus scanning of all traffic passing through the machine?

You need the Copfilter extension, that adds real time virus scanning and spam filtering (either or both depending on how you set it up). http://copfilter.org/ However I never got much luck making copfilter working so I can't help you here, maby someone else can.

I can also recomend getting the URLfilter extension and advanced proxy from http://www.urlfilter.net/ and http://www.advproxy.net/
Advproxy just makes Urlfilter work better (allegedly)

Use URLfilter to block adverts and dangerous websites, the easiest way would be to stop useing the copfilter blacklists (default) and start useing http://urlblacklist.com/ (read http://urlblacklist.com/?sec=download for a list of whats in each catagory)

To switch URLfilter over just use the option in the built in GUI. urlblacklist is NOT free but it is on the honour system so no password is needed.