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You could do what I do: use a compact computer with two NICs (motherboard NIC plus a PCI 3Com NIC) as the firewall. Run Devil-Linux from a read-only device. Then, the inside of your firewall can be a gigabit switch. Devil-Linux is pretty easy to configure, although perhaps not quite as easy as a consumer firewall/router with a good web-based GUI. You can boot Devil-Linux from a CD drive, with a write-protected floppy holding your settings; you can roll a custom CD with the settings burned onto it; or you can use a write-protected USB flash drive for everything. No hard drive is needed.

Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security.
Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.

steveha

What you want is called a "Load Balancer". I don't know of any software solutions off the top of my head, though you might look into Devil-Linux. However, I do know of a hardware solution, a load-balancing router like this one.

http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php

I use Devil Linux, Works quite nicely. I hand edit the rules, but it comes with shorewall and is compatible with firewall builder. Comes with a nice config utility too.

Add wwo network cards
Add free Linux 2.4 distribution or higher
Activate netfilter and iptable
See: ttp://www.netfilter.org/
Deploy firewall using instructions in the netfilter how-tos:
See: http://www.netfilter.org/documentation/

Or, if that's too much for you, just get the equipment and add one of the pre-configured firewall Linuxes like SmoothWall (http://www.smoothwall.org/), Devil-Linux (http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php) or Coyote Linux (http://www.coyotelinux.com/).

No fuss, no muss.

Steven

i failed to like debian (sorry), but falled litteraly in love w/ gentoo:
portage/emerge is very likable, and i agree with their philosophy and the way they express it. massive number of packages, transparency. the concept of meta-distribution is no joke, i use it as well for my home PC needs, on my workstation, my 64 MB old laptop and on my servers.

after a while using linux, i was loosing the flame. with all this stuff installed by default by most distribution linux was looking more and more blackboxed like windows, with its start-from-almost-nothing approache, the administrator is winning back the mastering of his system.

gentoo is a salutary return to the roots and the spirit of unix.

it brings the same freshness feeling than migrating from (bloated) gnome desktop to xfce.

P.S.: i use devil-linux too, perfect for network stuff on diskless recycled PCs.. very nice stuff too !

can you boot it off CD and just use that (without a hard drive)? Devil Linux is a firewall distro that specializes in just being a bootable CD firewall. You store your config on a floppy and set the floppy's no-write tab once you are set.

My quick look leads me to believe the following:

Devil Linux only boots from CD, while LEAF can do that or boot from a floppy.

Devil Linux has more features, and thus needs more memory (than a floppy-based LEAF at least).

Devil Linux uses the 2.4.x kernel, which is available in one of the LEAF branches, but is not the default LEAF version.

Anyone care to add to and/or correct this?

I added the "cutter" program to the CVS for Devil Linux last week. There should be beta Devil Linux ISO's containing "cutter" appearing on the FTP site shortly.

- BS (Devil Linux core developer)