Firewall

[The Astroman]

Do you think a dedicated box with a Firewall OS such as IPCop or SmoothWall (do you know any other?) at the entry of the network is just as good or better than a McAfee Firewall on every computer of the network?

 

[Byteman]

From network administration point of view, yes. The last thing you want to do is have to deal with multiple desktop fw's. Usually the corporate fw's allow the admin greater control of traffic in and out of his network. Whether you decide to put a fw on each desktop or not, you should always have one at your gateway.

 

[The Astroman]

But for home application?

 

[The Astroman]

Reviving thread, cause I need an answer (McAfee subscription running out, and I have an used PC lying around which I could convert in a firewall)

 

[mikejr]

I would take an old box with 2 nic's installed, and boot to a linux live cd (gentoo, knoppix, backtrack, anything with iptables and support for both nics) and set it up. The file system is read only, have it send logs to another machine on the network and let it roll.

You can use gentoo to build a live cd pared down to just the essentials, and the routing and iptables built in if you like.