Hey - hit a newbie with a quickie
 

Hey everyone

What is the difference between IPcop and Smoothwall?
i am a newbie and i wanna know which firewall should i be setting up in a A.) home and B.) work environment

i have dabbled in both and they seem to be very very similar - however i have heard strong criticism of one and praise of the other and vice versa - if you could just ease my mind it would be appreciated


Thank you

As far as I can see the main difference is strong bright personalities fighting each other. IPCop is a fork from Smoothwall and so they are very similar. Smoothwall is more commercial, IPCop more "pure". They look and behave pretty much the same but will probably grow further apart.

They are both great distros and you can safely use either. Toss a coin and install the winner.

That is my 2c into what is quite likely to develop into a flame war :)

ZB

IPCop is far more worthy of your support imo, your alot more likely to get support from the IPCop community as there are no 'paid for' or 'corporate' versions, so no-one gets priority, and also, I do believe that some of the corp smoothwall features are not included in the free version, unlike IPCop

Basically IPCop has a lot more features that the GPL version of Smoothwall. The development is a lot more responsive too, from what I can tell. The commercial version of Smoothwall may very well be better than IPCop, but are you going to buy a license?

nah im not in a high pressure situation at the moment so i doubt ill be worrying about licencing for now. Thanks for the info guys.

Now i am trying to place a IPCop in my workplace - and i have a problem where i configured the system to a computer under a "green+red" topology where the "green" was a Intel Pro nic, now i am trying to utilize the IPCop in another machine where the "green" is a realtek 5300tx (cheap cheap card but im not to fussed bout it)

Where my problem lays is when i try to change the assumed "green" Intel pro to the Realtek or even to auto detect it. I have restarted the network and computer with NO NICS installed or even inserted into the system board and it STILL recognises "green" as a intel pro


i am without ideas not - i thought the network stop and start would have done it - AND i am looking for a conf file to delete this intel pro entry to which i have no avail

If you guys could gime just a lil push in the right direction i wud be grateful


Thanks agains fellas

What do you mean "utilize the IPCop in another machine"? Are there two different computers? If so, how did the settings from one get transferred to another? Did you restore a backup from the first machine onto a different machine? If so, that would explain why you're having problems. Try installing from scracth on the new system.

If you mean something else entirely, could you clarify?

Hey - yeh sorry if my explinations come out a bit incoherent, What i ment was:


* there are 2 computers and one IPCop HDD

*i installed and configured the IPCop HDD on computer 'A' and then moved the HDD to computer 'B'

*the IPCop HDD retained the NIC settings for computer 'A'

*i did not do a settings restore

*i could not OVERRIDE the settings from computer 'A' to the new home of the IPCop computer 'B' IE the NIC's settings



This is my conundrum :( i cannot change the nic settings from comp A even tho the IPCop HDD is in comp B

Thank you for ur support and interst though chort

Ahhh, very interesting. I remember there were some files in /var/ipcop or something like that and they held most of the configuration options. I would go look now, but I replaced my IPCop with an OpenBSD PF firewall that I wrote myself.

I would try the ipcop mailing list. There are instructions for signing up on the IPCop website. The quickest option of course would be to reinstall from the original CD-ROM.

I will be moving from my old friend Smoothwall GPL to IPcop due to the fact I cannot access the Smoothwall website (from my DSL connection) more often than not. Oherwise I have found Smoothwall to be great. Since IPcop seems so similar a change is called for.
I second the opinion that a reinstall (from CD or local HTTP) to be easier than a bothersome reconfiguration..
Good Luck.