New Office Networking

ISA's expensive, at least for a 7-pc office. It runs on a hardened version of Windows server (unless something's changed with ISA 2006). So you've got to buy licenses for both the server and ISA (cha-ching!). It's a nice product if you're comfortable with Microsoft packages.

Symantec, Cisco, and Sonicwall, along with a slew of other companies manufacture standalone firewall products (with proxy features) that start out around $300-400. IPcop, pfSense, and Smoothwall are all free open-source products that also offer a proxy server as a feature. You'd need a PC to load those.

A lot of folks are real high on the free stuff, but I've seen admins load these systems on computers, that though they met minimum sys req's, they were way too slow and choked bandwidth. If you're going to go with a do-it-yourself firewall/gateway like IP cop, don't cheap out on the hardware. Get a minimum P4 and 512 mb's ram and some 1 gb nics.

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Originally Posted by brokencrow

IPcop, pfSense, and Smoothwall are all free open-source products that also offer a proxy server as a feature. You'd need a PC to load those.

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That's great - I figured that ISA server would have been overkill. As I implied, my interest in this is from an amateur point of view, so I'll be investigating Smoothwall and IPcop. I've seen them discussed elsewhere in the context of a firewall. I didn't realise that they have proxy server capability.

The above comments are interesting as well as quite suggesive.

well i guess if we didnt load the DNS to those PC and take away the administrative rights from them would be a better Idea.

and when it comes to keep one more router would be a problem as it will consume space as the area of this office is small.

But there is one more part i was a little doughtfull about
if we create one of the PC out the 4 PC with internet previllege as a server then we can block port 80 for the other 3 PC and allow for the rest of the PC.
Can we do such kinda seperation?

or not?