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I have a medium sized organization with users between 300-500 users. I am looking for software firewall for this type orgnization.

Which type of software do you guys prefer, am not looking for hardware firewall...Can u suggest me some names of software firewall for this kind of organization.

thanks,

Gary

i want to Examine the various software firewalls available and compare their functionalities, cost, features and type of protection.

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If you want a border firewall, as your answer to @Dave below says, and you want a software one, then you'll need to tell us what hardware (and OS) you plan on running under it. Also, please fill in some details, like why a hardware firewall isn't a good solution for you. – mfinni Jun 11 '10 at 20:38
Please edit the question to answer these: How much bandwidth will pass through the device? Will you have a lot of static mappings? Will you want to do any kind of advanced IPS/IDS/virus scanning on the firewall? What hardware and/or operating system do you need it to run on? – Dave Jun 11 '10 at 22:10

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Is this a software firewall for client computers or a firewall for intranetwork access or something else?

If you're talking about a software firewall for individual computers, it depends on their operating system.

If you're talking about a centralized firewall, then iptables on Linux is great. An alternative is pf in the BSD world.

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yes am talking about centralized firewall.. – user45019 Jun 11 '10 at 20:32
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What exactly do you mean by "software firewall"? Nearly all firewalls (yes, even Cisco ASAs) are "software firewalls".

My firewall platform of choice is PFSense. It's based on FreeBSD, has a nice GUI, and will run on standard x86 hardware, from within VMware, or on dedicated embedded hardware as well.

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hey thanks, heard about checkpoint.. can you recommend me which checkpoint firewall to use. and what is the cost of the software ?/ – user45019 Jun 11 '10 at 20:35
I've never touched a checkpoint firewall, so I can't give a recommendation for or against. – EEAA Jun 12 '10 at 4:27
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ive tried out almost every firewall distro avaliable, and have a list of favourites i always reccomend to others. in no particular order:

  • eBox (Ubuntu based --currently runs 8.04, soon to be 10.04, with 1.5)
  • Endian (LFS based)
  • pfSense (BSD based)
  • ClearOS (CentOS based -- 5.5)

you may also look at Untangle (it has potential imho) but its not quite there yet. ymmv.

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