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I'm trying to find a good 1U rack firewall at a reasonable price. Most pricing is completely out of space (thousands of dollars? Why?). I don't want to list all features I need/want (there are too many variations but I don't care about most of them) - I'm just looking for something simple and not overly expensive.

I've looked at the WatchGuard XTM 505 which is more reasonably priced -- are there any other firewalls in that range or even less expensive that are good for a small company?

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Have you looked at running pfSense on a Supermicro Atom SuperServer. That will run you less than $400. There is a good book on pfSense and commercial support is also available.

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    +1. I can't recommend this enough. I love me some pfSense.
    – EEAA
    Dec 15, 2010 at 3:45
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    pfSense is definitely the way to go, it fits the budget and its easy to use.
    – Luis Ventura
    Dec 15, 2010 at 5:44
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    +1. I had pfsense running on a 100Mbit/s line for 200 servers and it worked like a charm !
    – Antoine Benkemoun
    Dec 15, 2010 at 8:16
  • Is the Atom server powerful enough for filtering 50-100 Mbps of traffic? I'm a bit skeptical :)
    – AX1
    Dec 15, 2010 at 17:59
  • well you never specified what sort of throughput you were looking for in your question. I've seen reports of an Atom N270 based pfsense doing up to 400Mbps filtering. But if you need a lot of IPSEC throughput you may need to step up to bigger hardware. The Atom n270 stuff I've seen is capable of doing 13-40Mbps IPSEC depending on the encryption being used. But the beauty of pfSense is that it runs on x86 hardware so it's capable of meeting your needs given the right hardware. But if you need more power look at other 1U SuperServers...there's not wrong with over building a little.
    – 3dinfluence
    Dec 15, 2010 at 19:03
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You can check the Mikrotik Routerboard RB1100 http://routerboard.com/index.php?showProduct=98

It going to cost you USD399.

Very powerful Mikrotik RouterOS, you can check its features in http://wiki.mikrotik.com

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Here is what we just bought:

http://www.prosecure.netgear.com/products/prosecure-utm-series/models.php

Found the UTM5 on buy.com for $233. It is replacing a POS Watchguard.

It is for a small shop with 9 servers. Thus far, extremely happy with it. NAT'ing 5 external IPs and lots of rules. I don't think there is anything like for this price.

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  • How much traffic do you usually have?
    – AX1
    Dec 15, 2010 at 4:08
  • The reason I'm asking is that the UTM looks more like an office firewall than a server firewall (from what they advertise - protect desktops from browsing bad websites etc.). Or am I seeing this wrong?
    – AX1
    Dec 15, 2010 at 7:29
  • About a gig a day.
    – Mike
    Dec 15, 2010 at 13:19
  • @AX1 - that's an accurate assessment of the AX1. As you've seen by the votes, pfSense is a much preferred (and much more flexible/expandable) solution for and environment like yours.
    – EEAA
    Dec 15, 2010 at 13:57
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I recently purchased a Watchguard XTM 505 because I needed a gigabit firewall/router that could handle about 150 Mbps of traffic to start.

I chose Watchguard I couldn't find anything else that had what I needed for a good price and because have had some good experience with their products in the past.

I was originally happy with the price (~$1300) and happy with the features and web interface but now I'm running into the connection limit (40,000 concurrent connections) Sadly, there don't appear to be any management tools that tell me what it is counting as connections and how the count is affected by NAT.

Now I am kind of stuck. Upgrading to a 520 to get 100,000 connections is a simple software update but the price is *ridiculous* - about $5000.

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  • As an aside, I didn't realize that m0n0wall had resulted in anything like pfSense. Very cool. It looks great. If I can't do anything to reduce my connections I may just ditch this box and go with that.
    – outcassed
    Jan 6, 2011 at 7:22
  • I've switched to a pfSense based firewall and I love it.
    – outcassed
    Jan 23, 2011 at 17:30

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