No firewall- please suggest solutions

[motty123]

this is the situation:

very small company is about to be taken over by another- when this eventually happens the new co. will install firewall & vpn. Until then they cannot spend any money on IT at all.

At the moment they have a broadband connection and all machines have live ips! mixture of nt & 2k. They also have an nt server (domain controller and exchange server). The exchange as it stands needs a live ip as the mx records points to another co's firewall which forwards to that ip.

I know that this situation cries out for a firewall, but they cannot buy one as the company that is taking them over
has frozen their spending and wants to install a firewall when the take over is complete. This isnt likely to be soon though.

They do have spare win2k server license and hardware (couple of pII's) and i could get hold of spare nics.

I am trying to think of a design that will keep mail coming in but take all the machines on to a private ip range- so far nothing- maybe something to do with internet connection sharing?

Any sugestions greatly appreciated.

 

[pansophic]

2 words. Linux Firewall. There are a couple of discussions on this site that will give you lots of opinion, and even some information on Linux firewalls. Many of us like them, and run them ourselves. I think that you will find plenty of support, and most of them are configured through a web-based GUI, so you don't have to be a Linux expert, the OS is transparent to you. But the cost is $0 for many of these, and even the ones that charge you will generally allow you to download a "free" version for testing or home use.

Like you said, you've got the hardware sitting there, and most of them will run very well on your PII as long as you aren't doing a bunch of VPN tunnels.


pansophic

 

[motty123]

Thanks for the speedy response pansophic!

Ive had a look around the posts and I think i will give ipcop a go.

Thanks Again

Motty.