Best Firewall?

[finsfree]

I want to buy a firewall for my home so I can play around with some advanced setting that a normal consumer grade router won't do. I want a firewall that has a GUI and not just a terminal interface.

So far I've been looking at:
- Zywall 110
- Juniper SRX220

I'm leaning towards the Zywall 110, but I know Juniper seems to be the wave of the future. There are also other firewalls out there like Sonic wall and Cisco.

In your option which one has more bang for the buck for learning and playing around with different advanced settings?

Thx,

 

[beers]

What kind of budget? If you have a spare PC or even virtual machine you can run pfSense for free.

What kind of settings are you interested in?

 

[Okedokey]

What kind of budget? If you have a spare PC or even virtual machine you can run pfSense for free.

What kind of settings are you interested in?

Interesting, we run this at work. You install it on a second computer do you? how does that work in terms of config and setup on a home network? Thanks

 

[beers]

Interesting, we run this at work. You install it on a second computer do you? how does that work in terms of config and setup on a home network? Thanks

You could do it on a VM if you wanted to. Physically you'd either have a dedicated NIC for each WAN and LAN segment or could break it out by VLAN (outside, inside, dmz, etc) on a single physical interface. Most home setups would just use it 'as the router' but you can simply pass traffic through the pfSense instance between the Internet and your inside hosts along some segment in order to utilize those policies and features.

 

[finsfree]

What kind of budget? If you have a spare PC or even virtual machine you can run pfSense for free.

What kind of settings are you interested in?

Thanks but I'm wanting a physical device. As far as setting, it's more of a learning thing. I would like to have my VPN encrypted through. Right now I have a DD-WRT router that will only do PPTP (less secure).

My budget is something USED in good condition priced around $150.00. That is why I was looking at the Zywall. My last IT Manager used to have us install these in small businesses. I was kind of a NOOB at the time and most of the setting were preset by the IT Manager.

 

[Agent Smith]

I've been messing around with pfSense in VMware in preparation for buying this: https://netgate.com/products/sg-1000.html

There's also Sophos Firewall and Untangle, but these require at least an ITX computer with I think 4 GB of RAM. If you do buy an ITX computer, make sure it has dual NICs. One for WAN and the other for LAN to the router.