hi there,

i'm looking for some kinda of intrusion prevention proxy/firewall? does anyone know of anything like this?

Hey! though your question is in a few words,but the answer will not be

You need to explain your situation here so that we can talk about proxy ,firewall etc.

regards

i'm looking at preventing spyware, malware, addware, etc from getting onto my windows machines, rather than running software on all my windows machine i was wondering if there was a way i could run one bit of software on my firewall or proxy server to prevent any spyware, malware, addware, etc from getting into my network.

There's no easy way, since most are distributed via an .exe which users run rather than a particular signature like a virus. We have a Squid/DansGuardian combo setup whereby standard users have no access to download various MIME types or file extensions known to cause problems. This puts up barrier 1. Barrier 2 still falls on your local machines though.

If you're not wanting to install protection on each machine, look at locking down the machines to increase security along the usual lines of removing un-necessary privileges whilst always struggling for the balance between security + freedom for the users to what they want!

The only thing I've seen is a front-end for something like iptraf which would monitor various ports that known spyware/malware/etc. runs on to let you then pinpoint the IP address of the machine infected. Still is more a workstation thing than an server-side filtering thing. Would be interested in other ideas though

take a look at astaro: http://www.astaro.com/firewall_netwo...security_facts

Seems a bit steep for something that's effectively checking for various URL's to prevent downloads from known spyware sites, and filtering various MIME types, ports, etc. Nice idea, but I don't see anything special that can't be accomplished without spending $330 for 10 user licenses...

well, that mentality could be applied to pretty much any commercial software (whether free or proprietary)... take suse linux, for example... or red hat linux... or crossover office... one can usually find a free way to do many of the things that commercial software solutions out there do... but the thing is that those commercial alternatives tend to come with added value, as that's the main function of this type of business - to add value to something... usually this added value will be of a service nature, but a lot of times it's proprietary software that you can't even dream of getting in the free software world... in astaro's case, it's a mix, but mainly the added value is integration... of course, this is not something that everyone will value the same way... like for example it's obviously not worth it to you - and that's okay... but for other people it is well worth it... maybe they don't have as much free time as you, or maybe they don't have as much skill, or patience, or whatever... they are willing to pay so that they don't have to jump through the hoops that most of us free software users have become accustomed to... for many small businesses that don't have the money to have a linux geek on the payroll that is indeed priceless... we can't assume that everyone that posts asking about a solution is looking for something free...

of course, there is indeed competition in the gateway market, for example clark connect... maybe they offer better deals:

http://www.clarkconnect.com/

either way, astaro was just a suggestion... there are of course countless free firewall distros out there that will do similar things in similar ways (but not equal)... perhaps one of those will be good enough for the OP... or maybe he would be happy installing a generic distro like slackware or fedora and then getting and compiling all the necessary apps to turn it into a kick-ass gateway/firewall for his LAN... might be fun, who knows...

anyways, paul_mat, about the firewall distros, here's a few to look at:

http://www.devil-linux.org/

http://www.ipcop.org/

http://www.smoothwall.org/

http://www.redwall-firewall.com/

http://www.efw.it/

since you're basically looking for an IPS/IDS, a proxy, a virus scanner, and a firewall, it should be noted that, as has been said by fouldsy, you can indeed achive this functionality with any distro if you install the right apps... here's four apps you should definitely take a look at if you want to do this on a generic distro:

for the IPS/IDS: http://www.snort.org/

for the proxy: http://www.squid-cache.org/

for the firewall: http://www.netfilter.org/

for the virus scanner: http://www.dansguardian.org/
(dansguardian is a web content filter, but it includes virus scanning capability...)

just my ...