I need your advice about something-

I want to built a firewall/Internet gateway with Linux in my pap office.

I want to manage the incoming and the out coming traffic in the local LAN.
And i want it to have some kind of proxy that can do application level firewall (Anti spy ware etc).

My main idea is using CentOS or ubuntu server (What do you think?)
* Shorewall for easily manege the Iptable rules.
* Snort for the IDS.
* Squid for the proxy (Does it have application level filtering?).
* Tripwire for file integrate.
* SSH for "VPN" to get into the internal network from the outside.

I am missing a good WIndows iptable log viewer to detect abnormality's.

Help needed,
Asaf

just curious: how much linux experience do you have?? also, i'm kinda wondering why you've chosen generic distros for this, when there's several specially-tailored firewall distros out there...

as for viewing iptables logs from windoze, if you SSH into the linux box using putty, you can pretty much less and grep your logs just as if you were on linux...

PS: squid doesn't do application level... but (for example) zorp does...

I think i am above avarage user..
Do you think ubnutu will do a better job then CentOS?

objectively speaking, the distro shouldn't make any difference - they should both do their jobs fine - you should instead focus on picking the one that lets you do *your* job fine... having said that, i'd still like to know why you have chosen a generic distro instead of a firewall distro, such as (for example) smoothwall, ipcop, devil linux, redwall, etc...