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Are there any open source firewalls for linux that

  • can be installed on a server and bring their own linux OS?
  • have a graphical user interface?

Would be great if the firewall

  • would be based on Debian linux
  • is still supported by an active community

The ones I found are all commercial and not suitable for usage in small enterprises.

PS: I know I could just fiddle with IPTables, but I wondered if there is a product that does not make me to do that.

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  • Why does it have to be Linux/Debian? There are a lot of open source firewalls out there. PFSense is one of the biggest, but it's FreeBSD. May 9, 2011 at 6:28
  • Okey, maybe I should start with FreeBSD here. I'll try PFSense
    – Daniel
    May 9, 2011 at 9:08

5 Answers 5

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I would go also with pfsense. It's based on FreeBSD but that should not matter since you probably won't interact much with the operating system itself unless you want to. It uses a nice webinterface for configuration.

If you need linux for some reason there are one project called ipcop (www.ipcop.org) and another called smoothwall (www.smoothwall.org). I prefer pfsense though, because of more features and i'm more comfortable with pf firewall than iptables.

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  • I installed pfSense, and despite having to get around some FreeBSD speak and fiddeling with vi, I really like it. Does everything I need. And its fast althought it just runs in a virtual machine. Great tool.
    – Daniel
    May 9, 2011 at 19:49
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I agree with the answers / comments from Kristoffer and Mark. Also M0n0Wall is a good one, also based on FreeBSD.

IF you still insist on a Linux based open source firewall, Endian Firewall Community might be a reasonable choice.

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We have recently started using IPCop for our visitor network, and I was pleasantly surprised by its simplicity and ease of use. It is a linux distro, but not really Debian based. It is definitely in active development.

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  • I believe the current 1.4 version is from 2004 ?!?
    – Daniel
    May 9, 2011 at 19:50
  • I use the 1.9 beta release, which is perfectly stable and does the trick for us.
    – wolfgangsz
    May 12, 2011 at 15:08
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Debian than you should look at Untangle

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  • Not really free sadly.
    – Daniel
    May 9, 2011 at 19:50
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I have used IPCop for a few years at my home, and was VERY happy with it. Very customizable, easy to use, and worked really nice without any issues. I never tried PFSense, but seems to do about the same thing as IPCop.

I had tried Untagle before using IPCop, and the software was very limited unless you paid for different things that you wanted to use. Also it seemed a bit bloated for what I was looking for (the GUI was very nice - but unnecessary for what I wanted).

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