Firewall and Gateway combos...

I have a small 4 computer home Ethernet LAN, and I've been trying to find a good combination of Firewalls and Gateways to get it to give less of a signature to anyone who may be "looking" At first I started out with Zone Alarm for a firewall and Proxy Plus to allow my LAN to use the internet. I just recently started experimenting with other combinations after hearing about some holes in Z.A. Currently I am using Avirt Gateway and Tiny Personal Firewall. Anyway, my question is this, does anyone know of a really good combination of programs, that are win and linux friendly, as my LAN has both on it.

upgrade to tiny pro, i like that alot. its about 170 bucks if i remember correctly, it rocks.

simple....OpenBSD...or setup one of your linux boxes with netfilter......voila....firewall and gateway.

www.clarkconnect.org

Easy to setup and use, nice features, very reliable.

As HogFly said... an OpenBSD box with ipf running or similiar, running as a dual-homed bastion host in front of your LAN. <edit>Last I remember OpenBSD came with both ipfilter (ipf) and ipNAT on the thing... all you have to do is to turn it/them on and configure them</edit>

I've used clarkconnect for a while now and I use the dynamic DNS feature and the mail gateway feature and it rocks. Haven't had any issues to speak of.

For the not-so-linux-inclined it's great....

Ahh yes,

All those may be well and good but my personal favorite is Redhat Linux running iptables! There are a lot of good examples out there to go off of (google will provide a plethora.) it also happens to be a free solution, which is also good. Done properly, this setup will easily put your system into the "good luck..." catagory with many 99999's in your difficulty rating when someone does a system detection. You can also have fun mangling your ports if you're feeling really froggy, but that can be a challenge with many different OS's in your private subnet.

A bit of advice though, make sure you understand every piece of every rule that you use. It can be easy to fork up when you're first learning it.

If you read about clarkconnect you'll find out that that's exactly what it is except it has all other services disabled and a bunch of little things done to it to make it more secure. Plus it's an easy LINUX system to install and configure and you don't have to go learn about dependencies and all that crap just to protect yourself.

everyone > thanx for all the help. As of now I have to use my windows 2kp workstation as the gateway for my lan, because I dont have a desktop ready with linux yet (i've been downloading SuSE)

In that case, give Outpost a try for your firewall.. http://agnitum.com/products/outpost/ ..

Excellent interface and functionality...it's a bit of a pain with a dial-up connection sometimes, but I assume that's not a problem.

Ouroboros

Okay, ive been playing around with tiny and outpost a bit. What would be a good set of deny/allow rules?

I originally had Outpost set to disable everything under 'Web Pages' and 'Mail News' but it got to be a hassle adding sites. I recently changed 'Web Pages' to Enable 'Cookies' and 'Java & VB Scripts' and have had no problems. I left 'Mail News' with everything disabled. Be sure to add the programs (AV, FTP, E-Mail, etc.) you want to access the Internet under 'Applications' with the proper 'Rules' before going on-line and you'll have fewer Outpost pop-up permission requests. Another thing to remember is that Outpost works hand-in-hand with Internet Explorer's security settings. Hope this helps some.