Recommend me a firewall/router distro
 

Hello Linux community. I am quiet new to Linux except for some mild experience with Puppy Precise and Mint. I have been thinking for some years to use a dedicated hardware firewall/router for a home network (5 Win7 machines, 4 wireless android devices and a network printer)

I have a spare machine HP DC7600 Pentium D 3.00Ghz with 4GB RAM and 80GB HDD. I can add extra network cards and have a CISCO Small Business 16 port unmanaged switch.

My requirements are at the minimum:

- Firewall and router. I have a Billion 7800N modem/firewall/router. The modem part works ok but other functions are lacking.
- File server. Must be able to read/write NTFS
- Router
- QoS
- PPTP/OpenVPN/L2TP
- VPN client. Need to connect to a remote VPN service (StrongVPN) for downloads
- Torrent client
- Internet browser (simple browser will do)
- Antivirus
- Printer support
- I do not need mail/website hosting or cloud functionality
- Easy out of the box setup with GUI.
- FREE with strong community support

Would appreciate if someone can point me to the right direction.

few things to mentions.

1. never put your file server on the same physical hardware as your firewall. have a true dedicated FIREWALL, not a hodgpodge, that is how things go very wrong very fast.

2. look into IPCop and or IPFire. IPCop is a bit old, but still very very reliable. IPFire is a newer reworked version of IPCop plus it will handle IPv6 were IPCop will not.

3. Print server again should NEVER be on the same physical hardware as your firewall. keep the firewall a firewall and nothing else. Your firewall should perform the following tasks:

a. a firewall to protect from intrusion
b. provide basic router functionality such as NAT, port forwarding, etc...
c. provide specific services such as local DNS, DDNS hosting.

and not much else.

For your file server and print server put them on a separate box that is NOT your firewall, that is unless you just want people to crack into 1 box and own everything in your network that is. if that is the case, then by all means keep all of those services on a single point of entry.