Firewall Operating Systems
 

I'm looking for the best firewall operating system (preferably for free) in existence.

It must be secure, it must be reliable and stable, and it must be as close to "industry standard" as possible.

Also, it must *not* be a piece of software which needs to be installed onto an existing operating system, the firewall must be an operating system itself.

Can anyone recommend any of the above? Are there any "famous" ones in existence, or ones which thousands of people use and rely on?

Thanks in advance! :D

i have just discovered Smoothwall, which looks very good. Is this one recommended?

Personally, I like m0n0wall. It may not have all the features of Smoothwall, but it has some that Smoothwall doesn't (like support for multiple WAN IP addresses) and will run satisfactorily on very minimal hardware.

Hi,
I have found www.ipcop.org with www.urlfilter.net and www.advproxy.net are great and reliable

Astaro
http://www.astaro.com/

Sentry CD
http://software.newsforge.com/articl...1925244&tid=78

--
++firefox; printf("number of c++ code execution is %.2le\n",firefox);

Every Linux-based firewall is going to just be a front-end for netfilter in the Linux kernel. Personally, I just use Debian.

m0n0wall is based on freeBSD, but it's a dedicated firewall operating system, not an add-on program for a "regular" distribution. It's stripped down to the point where the entire install is only like 8MB. It doesn't even use the hard drive (or CF card, or CD-ROM) after it boots. It runs entirely in RAM.

It's the same principle though, instead of a front-end for netfilter it's a front-end for ipf.