M0n0wall Firewall
Well the time has come to retire my firewall, it’s done me well and has run for years with little effort, but it’s running on an old Dell 2300 which is really a giant power hog, and it’s noisy too! It was running a retired version of Fedora (6) and it has long since been patchable. I had been hanging onto it simply because it just worked. But with the changes in the world today, I just don’t need it anymore. I’ve moved my photos to Picasa and Google only charges me $20 for 80GB of space, I mean really, how can you compete with that? Next to the firewall function, my Blog was the only other item I had to be concerned about, and I was graciously offered a home by my friend Sean who is hosting it for me. The only function left was the firewall, and I had an old Dell Optiplex GX115 kicking around, to which I threw in a second NIC and then installed m0n0wall. I can’t say that I’ve been more impressed with an out of the box product that just works and is FREE! I downloaded the ISO and burnt it on to a CD, and then booted it up on my old Dell. It recognized everything and took me about 10 minutes to set up. It had a DHCP server which was a must for me, and it had a decent web GUI as well. It saves the configuration on a USB stick so if it ever dies, you can resurrect it onto the next server in line for the scrap heap. As an added bonus to the many features it has the ability to Traffic Shape, which is great for your Bit Torrents. All in all, I can certainly recommend this if you are in need of a firewall at home, and don’t like using your featureless router/access point.
