I've been wanting to run a firewall such as pfsense or m0n0wall in a virtual machine on my PC and have my PC (host) be firewalled and possibly NAT'ed behind it. This will work as my primary firewall since I don't have a router at the moment and will be a 2nd layer of defense as well as a 2nd nat layer afterwards (i know that's unnecessary).

Is this as safe as having the firewall on separate hardware? What extra dangers, if any, do you face running it on the same system? Lastly, can you use a guest firewall such as this for other systems if you have a 2nd network card on the PC?

Thanks.

Real hardware firewalls/routers, at least newer ones, are created and designed to "fail closed" which means that if someone does DoS it, or break it some other way, it will stop working all together.

This means that you wont have internet connectivity, but at least they can't get in, at that time, either.

If you use a regular piece of hardware, like a server, and a software firewall, your results may vary on this front. Perhaps someone overflows your NIC and gains access to your entire server and network... rather than getting locked out.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks.