Suggest A Router Distro

[sentinel]

I want to setup a *nix router for this small office I manage.

I've got a P2 box which will be perfect for it, but I'm having trouble deciding which distro to use.

I've used m0n0wall and IPCop, and pfSense looks kind of appealing, but I know there's countless others.

Is there a side-by-side comparison of features somewhere?

Does anyone here run any of them?

Or better yet, could someone please just tell me which one to use and tell me why.

TIA :)

[ZeR0BuG]

I personally like clark connect, its free, has great webfiltering, ad/pop up blocking. Has agreat fire wall. Its reliable. I use it now and ive never had a problem with it.

[rFayjW98ciLoNQLDZmFRKD]

you should be happy with any linux based setup, as long as it is properly configured.

[stingwray]

Monowall is the best I have used.

I'm currently in the process of testing all the Router distros that I can find and writing about them. Seeing how well they perform, and bugs in the system etc. Should be interesting when its finished as there are some interesting difference already.

IPCop, Monowall, pfSense, Redwall, Smoothwall, XORP, and a few more that I can't remember atm.

If anyone knows of any I have missed (there must be some because I have more than this on my machines somewhere) then let me know.

[ZeR0BuG]

aww comon you didnt mention clark connect!

[Lamezoid]

Hiya,

I've ran FREESCO, available at www.freesco.org, for a number of years.

I haven't used software routers in a long while, but if stingwray is going to compare and contrast them, I'm interested in seeing the results.

I used FREESCO as a dialup router for my home network before broadband was available here. I ran the squid proxy caching server and privoxy to block ads and annoying content for the entire network to help increase web browsing speed. I also ran samba, pureftpd, and apache on it for LAN file sharing.

The main problem I had with it (apart from running the 2.0.x kernel ;) ), was it didn't support FHS, so porting applications to it was cumbersome. There's a large library of packages available, so that might not be a factor depending on need.

Now I miss tinkering with it, so I'm going to toss it on an old box and check out what improvements have been made since I gave it up.

TC

[JD]

i'm a big fan of smoothwall...i used it once and loved it, but i stopped using it cuz it was too much work...it was running beautifully on a P1 200MhZ MMX with 64MB of RAM and a 8GB HD

[sentinel]

Monowall is the best I have used.

I'm currently in the process of testing all the Router distros that I can find and writing about them. Seeing how well they perform, and bugs in the system etc. Should be interesting when its finished as there are some interesting difference already.

IPCop, Monowall, pfSense, Redwall, Smoothwall, XORP, and a few more that I can't remember atm.

If anyone knows of any I have missed (there must be some because I have more than this on my machines somewhere) then let me know.

From the little bit i've used it, I like m0n0wall. I would absolutely love to see your comparison when it's done (or even before that).

The best list of them I know of is here: http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Firewall

[stingwray]

The best list of them I know of is here: http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Firewall

Cool thanks, I didn't realise you could search DistroWatch.