Nice and Cheap Firewall?

Is this for personal use on a home system?If so,try sygate's free personal edition.

http://soho.sygate.com/products/shield_ov.htm

This solution is for office use.  So I need a descent firewall that's within the given budget of $2000.

This solution is for office use.  So I need a descent firewall that's within the given budget of $2000.

www.sonicwall.com

I've set up a few of these for clients. Easy, cheap, variable sizes to fit your needs.

OpenBSD v3.1 - free, running on simple PC hardware (eg a PIII with 128MB RAM is sufficient, ethernet card + whatever inteerface your internet connection is on). I am currently sitting behind one that regulates traffic for a 200-strong software development firm. Current uptime, 129 days, following a scheduled outage in order to relocate it. You can set it up either as a router/gateway between two interfaces, or as a filtering bridge, which can just sit on your ethernet network and requires no messing about with your client machines at all.

http://www.openbsd.org


Vijay

129 days, so it's cost you about $100 electricity over that period whereas the hardware box would have cost about $5 for the same length of time. Not saying anyone's right or wrong but it's part of the cost that often gets overlooked.

What about Zone Alarm? - http://www.zonelabs.com/
The home version is free, for the professional (office) check the website.

For some compressions and some of the reasons why I decided to go with ZA, check www.grc.com (Steve Gibson)

[]s
Claudio

Have you considered a FireBox from Watchguard?

http://www.watchguard.com

The model comparison char can be found at:

http://www.watchguard.com/products/fbcompare.asp

An example of a few resellers:

http://www.cdw.com/shop/tools/sbb/vendor.asp?mfg=wtg
http://www2.warehouse.com/search/pppsmainsearch.asp?qu=%40mfr%5Fname+Watchguard&flag=banner&RefURL=Links
http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/vendor_spotlight/Watchguard/

Hope you find what you're looking for!

Before you believe the statements on GRC.com or consider chosing your security based on his "expertise", check:

http://clusterfsck.net/module.php?mod=node&or=1

and

http://www,grcsucks.com

for a bit of a different view on Steve and his statements.

i love Astaro Security Linux, easy install (8 steps, all you have to do is enter the external ip), beautiful interface (ssl out of the box), million cool functions, VPN, proxies of all kinds, masquarading/NAT, easy DMZ setups, self updating the system and virus signatures (if you're monitoring for viruses).   good basic version (25 users, 10 vpn tunnels) will cost you barely over 1000$/3yrs.
this is about as much as 'set and forget' as it gets.  i used to build custom firewalls for my clients, now i just tell them to buy this, and i install it for them.  everyone is very happy with them, even the execs, as it comes with pretty graphs for monitoring bandwith/hardware/users.

LOL, $1000/3yrs is the electricity cost I came out with as well. So are free products costing you too much?

andyalder, how are you calculating your power prices? I looked up, more or less at random, the power consumption of an average desktop pc , the HP Vectra XE310, and it's supposedly taking 40W.

( http://www.hp.com/desktops/library/pdfs/5831_xe310xp_DataSheet_052402_rc.pdf, page 6 )

If the little hardware box you mentioned is taking 15W, then the electricity consumed by something like a Vectra ought to be 2-3 times that of the PIX. But you seem to be talking about electricity costs an order of maginitude greater, or more.

Could you explain?

Vijay

You're right Vijay, I got the costs wrong. But I was assuming an old PC for the job so more like 120W rather than the 40W of a new machine and I forgot you can turn the monitor off. Also I was allowing for real consumption being 30% more than actual consumption because the air-con cost. If it runs from floppy and sits 100% in RAM with the screen turned off and hard disk off then the PC uses about 3 times what a hardware box uses, if it's an old PC with the monitor left on then 10 times the energy used.