Solid Small Office Based Firewall

[wisdomwarrior23]

I support a small law office with 5 people, I have BlackIce running on each machine to help provide protection, but sometime BlackIce gets misconfigured or caused other issues to the users system. I would like to keep their systems as clean and simple as possible, and I understand a hardware based firewall would be a better choice. Can you recommend a good product under $300 bucks. They also share a DSL line. Thanks.

 

[jad]

get a cheap PC box, and install Linux with IPF or a similar ... then the machine will think they have direct access to the internet, but the internet won't have direct access to them.

either that or 'd-link' have a nice dsl firewalled network hub for under 100 quid in england, i know they do europe, i believe they do america, might be worth while getting one of them.

 

[wisdomwarrior23]

I appreciate it, I heard about the Linux option, I may go with that because we do have a spare machine at the office we could use. Which version of Linux should I go with? Red Hat 8.0 Professional?

 

[jad]

to tell you the truth i'm a solaris junkie ... but from what i remember RH8 professional had all the firewall and server stuff built in with some nice GUI configuration tools.

i'm know there are more out there, but i'm fairly certain that RH is as good as any.

Jon

 

[CaTSCaN]

Smoothwall is also a good option. It is free and you can download it from

http://www.smoothwall.org.

Very easy to set up and maintain.