Rob Raux - Observations

SmoothWall Firewall

Smoothwall is now a member of my home network, in fact, it’s now the first line of defense. I installed the SmoothWall Express 2.0 over the last week onto a machine I was using to serve music. I used the open source version of the software which has a few downsides to the commercial, the most noticeable to me being the VPN addresses must be static IP’s as opposed to FQDN. Since my home cable IP address does not change the often, this shouldn’t be too much of a bother. The benefits I receive from this, besides the built in Snort monitoring, logging, and easy to use interface, is the ability to connect to other smoothwall’s without much effort. With this, I can connect through our work interface and make any adjustments I need to from home. Sure this isn’t a function of smoothwall specifically, however I must say the software has it nicely bundled.