When you want to protect your internal network, either your business network or your home network and you want to install the firewall yourself, there is an option to use a Linux firewall application. Linux has many benefits about installing applications by yourself, of course you need to learn some Linux to do so, but that is one of the reasons why it might be a good idea to get to know Linux. You can install almost anything that you might need, and it’s free.

I am specifying a couple of good ones, but there are many more. I set a link at the bottom of this article, that links to a very long list of firewall options 🙂

Firestarter – When you’re using a desktop version of the Linux operating system, you can use this graphic firewall application.
•    Easy to use graphic interface (might ease configuration if you have some basic understanding of how firewalls work).
•    This application is of course an open source application, and free.
•    The firewall enables more than one station to be connected to it and of course be protected.
•    You can easily define inbound and outbound traffic – which are of course the core of firewall designation – defining who can exit and who can access the services from the internet.
•    The firewall includes – white-list & black-list traffic – who is allowed and who isn’t
•    You can monitor the traffic, see what is passing through your firewall and online events.

Endian Firewall – This firewall is based on the open source most common command line Linux firewall called IPCOP, This firewall includes web filtering (Web Proxy), SIP Proxy (for Switchboards), VPN, Content Filtering, Mail gateway, Anti-virus, Anti-spyware, Anti-fishing etc…
Some of it features are:
•    There is an easy to use web interface – web management service to configure it.
•    It supports Routing and NAT (for configuring what is allowed and disallow to pass through the firewall.
•    Port forwarding
•    Network traffic logs, Reporting system.
•    IPSec VPN – for VPN secured access from outside the network.
•    Anti -Virus is based on the Clam AV mechanism.
•    Traffic monitoring is by using the nTop.
•    SPAM Protection using pyzor
•    Dynamic DNS support
•    Dnsmasq – is used for the DHCP and DNS.
•    There is also Windows based support – Samba, LDAP, RADIUS.

SmoothWall Express – This firewall offers a good security firewall, for minimal hardware, which can be fitted well on old computers with old slow configurations. This firewall is being configured using a web based management console. You can configure ADSL, ISDN, Web Proxy, DHCP configurations.
There is a nice video that shows and explains about the Smooth-Wall.

There are many other options which you can read on at this link 🙂