[kwlug-disc] Linux Based Firewalls

[Jon Thiele]

For over 15 years, I have run CentOS based, SMEServer ( smeserver.org ) as
my main firewall, web server and file server for all of the various devices
in my home.   I've also installed this distro a quite a few smaller clients
over the years - were appropriate.  However, their latest release (May
2017) is built on CentOS 6.5 - and now past its End-of-life date.  It seems
that the maintainers are having a tough time building a distro with the new
CentOS release - all of their config files are written in Perl.  I did a
bit of testing work on the new release in the spring, but it appears they
are still a long way off.  So, maybe it's time to move on...

I searched the KWLUG archives - a couple of mentions of Linux based
firewalls but nothing I could see that was recent.  So, doing a bit of
research, it looks like pfSence and OPNsense (both BSD based) and ClearOS
are leading the pack.  Now, I really like PC based firewalls since I've
been running this setup for some time - however, I'm not married to them.
But I do have enough spare, reasonably speedy hardware to run a distro to
keep up with my internet connection (I think...)

I've looked at a couple of hardware solutions but they all seem to be
closed source solutions.  I also read any article that suggested
running OpenWRT as an alternative to a PC based product.  Interesting...

So, any recommendations and real world experiences from KWLUG?

Thanx in advance!!!

Jon


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