Is anyone using Untangle firewall? Whats the good bad and ugly.

I played with it a little. It seemed pretty straight forward to configure and manage. I didn't (and don't) really have a justification for deploying it at the moment but I was pleased with what it did for my week-or-so of playing with it.

And just to be clear this was playing with it. I just installed it on a dual-homed machine and re-routed my system only to use it just to see how it handled traffic, reporting, enforcing and such.

I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to recommending it for a SOHO but I'll still keep my doubts as to its robustness for a larger "enterprise" deployment until seeing how it stands up to small-office use. I won't entirely discount it either. It seems to be targeted for SOHOs anyway. It looks like it does what it was designed to do very well; combine many popular features/services in an easy to implement and manage interface.

My recommendation to you, throw it on some hardware (or virtualize it) and play with it yourself to see what you think about it and determine if it is for you or not.

Thanks. I'm really trying to find an OSS solution that does not act like Cisco. Untangle at least puts information up front and is clear. Monday I'll be trying them out.

There are a few Untangle deployments well in excess of 1000 users. Robustness is a function of the hardware used. If someone scrimps on hardware, they define their own limitations by doing so.

Well I didn't really expect a response from the Untangle team to be posted here. It's good to know that you are lurking in one of my favorite places. So heres my Untanle report so far. I have a 2Ghz,1GB ram, 80GB sata machine in testing. I pointed my home machine running Nessus against it. After a few connection attempts it started droping and rejecting packets left and right(rejecting the Nessus traffic). Then I turned on a lot of the content blocking. Most but not all porn sites got blocked. I tried going to the KKK website. Who knew they had one? It was blocked. Attempted to download a sample virus. It was blocked. Went to some sites that I thought your typical windows user would go and get hijacked. It was blocked. So I invited my boss to check it out. We have some more testing to do but it looks really good so far. If we use Untangle at our main plant we will begin deploying it to our remote locations as licenses expire. OH I forgot to mention that when I called Untangles support line , 30 SECONDS on hold and I could understand the Guy.


No I don't work for Untangle. It's just nice to see a good product with good support and it's GPL.

I agree 100% with you there. Poor capacity planning will come back to bite you in the rear when you least expect it... every time.