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Linux as a router... "router" distro or roll my own?

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Stratus_ss

Overclockix Snake Charming Senior, Alt OS Content
Joined
Jan 24, 2006
Location
South Dakota
I am going to be putting an old computer to work as a router to replace the POS dlink that I have.

I have been debating this for a while.

Do I go with something like PFSense or roll my own (i.e. Arch Linux as a router)

Thoughts?
 
I would go pfSense for actual use as everything is already configured for you. It is focused on being a router/firewall, so no extra packages are included (and shouldn't be!).

If you want to learn how to set it up, do that on an internal computer that isn't going to be protecting your entire network.
 
3rd vote for pfsense. IPcop is also an option. Depending how "old" the hardware is you might also look at Untangle if you want some virus/intrusion prevention features.
 
Thanks... many votes for PFSense which was my original plan.

The "old" hardware is a core2duo p8400 with 4 gigs of ram.

I will probably get that up and going in the next month or so thanks for the opinions!
 
Thanks... many votes for PFSense which was my original plan.

The "old" hardware is a core2duo p8400 with 4 gigs of ram.

I will probably get that up and going in the next month or so thanks for the opinions!

What board and what NICs will you be running?

The rebuild I was talking about previously is going to be either a C2D e2-6XXX with probably 2-4gb of RAM or a P4 3.2 (478) with 2-4gb of RAM

One thing I have noticed on my current build, try to avoid having PATA and SATA running together. My box is crashing randomly due to that issue (I think). New build will be either purely SATA or PATA depending on what I decide on.
 
Its an intel board, I forget off the top of my head, its got a 10/100 built in (that will be the wan) and I have a usb to gigabit ethernet 10/1000 that will be the internal network. I have a 250 gig SATA drive which should be more than sufficient
 
Astaro would be my first choice (currently running it). It's a very solid firewall appliance like distro, though "limited" in the sense that you cannot really add-on other software. Even though you cannot add-on anything to it (unless you really, really, really know the ins and outs of Linux), it has plenty of options to allow you to customize its function for the network your protecting, and imo, is the best at it.

pfSense would be my second choice. A stable firewall with lots of built in options, as well as the ability to add-on more.

Can't say much about IPCop, but it seems to be another good distro.

Dunno if its improved any since I last used it, but last I read about it the consensus still was to avoid Smoothwall. It has some quirks and bugs that really brings its function down, and it hasn't been able to catch up or keep up with the other 2 distros above (IPCop, pfSense).

[Edit] Just saw you mention the USB nic. You'd have to check if the distro supports it, as many do not support USB nics fully, if at all. You're better off with a PCI/PCIe NIC. [/edit]
 
A few days ago had a checkpoint FW fail on me, we setup ubuntu router: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Router

If you understand networking and mainly IP tables it isnt very hard.

But PFsense is much easier to configure since its ready to go, I use it internally to separate networks.

Why not just grab a cisco router? like a 2620XM or something along those lines.
 
A few days ago had a checkpoint FW fail on me, we setup ubuntu router: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Router

If you understand networking and mainly IP tables it isnt very hard.

Another vote for Ubuntu Router. I've been using it for almost 2 years now. I first started using it because of the bandwidth monitoring in Webmin that makes it easy to calculate usage since I use Comcast. I first started using it on an Atom 330 w/ 2 gigs of RAM. Since I also run a webserver off of it, the Atom didn't have the horsepower needed to get some db queries done in a reasonable time. I now have a router powered by an AMD FX-6100 w/ 16 gigs of RAM. It works great!
 
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