Slashdot Mirror
What is the Best Firewall for Servers?
Sushant Bhatia asks: "I maintain a bunch of servers (Win 2003/XP Pro) at our labs in the university. Of late, the number of attacks on the computers has been more noticeable. The university provides firewall software (Kerio) but that doesn't work with Win 2003 (works with XP). And so we keep getting hit by zombie machines taken over in the Education Department or from Liberal Arts :-). So what does the Slashdot crowd use when they need to secure their Linux and Windows servers? Does it cost less than US$100?"
Did you miss the part about how he works for a school? He has to get the money before it can be invested, and $100 might be the limit above which he has to get the approval of 3 PHBs and 6 beancounters.
Or maybe you missed the part about how the attacks are coming from other departments, over which he has no authority, and who obviously don't place a high value on security?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I hear this argument a lot, and you're right - it would work... but here's the thing - If you put a pentium I computer with a 2 gig hd or something up in front of an entire lab for internet access, I would wonder about the reliability. What I mean is, at work here I was doing something similar - but when the non-rendundant power supply in the 1995 based computer died, my entire part of the office lost net access, which is bad.
There is always something to be said about having a real server act as a firewall. For home use, sure, use an old computer running linux - but for anything that you would like to count on a reliable, get a real piece of hardware to put that linux distro on, and you'll be happier.