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Daniel
Asked: 2011-05-09 21:53:03 +0800 CST

Best linux based open source firewalls with graphical user interface

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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.

firewall linux open-source

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    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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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. Debian than you should look at Untangle

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  5. 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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