SmoothWall

[Alex Ferreira]

Greeting friends,

would love your opinion on this. I have a dedicated pc that I am going to turn into a firewall. I will be installing smoothwall on it. (www.smoothwall.org).

My question is, has anyone set smoothwall up? What are your thoughts on smoothwall if any?

Anyone have any experience with setting up a honeypot?

Thumbs up to you all.

Alex

[Steven E. Protter]

I have heard good things from other parties about smoothwall.

Since you are asking opinions, you can perform the same task with Red Hat Linux 7.3 and above, choosing the firewall configuration. This can be done on other distributions as well.

It will install iptables, which is state of the art, full featured and perform the same functionality.

Good luck, and post back if you want further details on how to proceed.

SEP

[Alex Ferreira]

Mr S.E.P.

Yeah bring on the procedures on. I will have to upgrade my RedHat version then. I have 7.2.

The reason why, I was thinking of setting smoothwall up is that it is browser based, thus making it very easy to install and very easy to use. It also has an inbuilt IDS. Which is great. I was planning on setting up a firewall, IDS, and also a honeypot. But I have been told, smoothwall has 'em all except for the honeypot.

What also attracted me to smoothwall, it has a great looking graphical interface.

SEP, had any experience with honeypots?

Cheers for your comments.

Alex

[Claudio Cilloni]

excuse my intrusion... Could you tell me what is a honeypot?

tx
Claudio
(no points, obviously :-)

[Alex Ferreira]

Mr Claudio,

A honeypot is basically a computer system on the Internet that is expressly set up to attract and "trap" people who attempt to penetrate other people's computer systems.

In other words, you setup a computer with keyloggers, and many other toys that logs every move an intruder is performing.

I hope this helps.

Alex.

[Claudio Cilloni]

... really interesting. But what is the reason to attract intruders? To keep them away from production machines? To study their moves?

tx!
Claudio

[jbjbjb]

Smoothwall is really easy to setup and has great security. Good for dialup and broadband. I have used 0.9.9 and 2.0 beta 4. The lastest version is 2.0 beta5, it runs Linux kernel 2.4, Squid proxy, IDS, Caching DNS, ipsec VPN, lots of logging.

You can install it and have it running in less than 30 minutes.

John

[Alex Ferreira]

John,

thanks heaps. I have downloaded the latest SmoothWall and should be installing it this weekend.. Cant wait..

Claudio, there are a few reasons for a honeypot, but the major ones are the ones you said.

Keep away intruders from production boxes, and if you like playing around with security, it is a great way to learn. Watchin people try break into your machine.

Alex