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M0n0wall Fork SmallWall Has First Official Release

Posted by timothy on from the now-with-less-shift-key dept.

New submitter houstonbofh writes: When the m0n0wall project ended back in February, many people just did not want to lose their small and lean firewall. And now, one of the forks, SmallWall, has released it's first non-beta release. It has some small improvements to the GUI, and now has added L2TP support. The announcement with the changes can be found here. Also, a partnership with MIXTPC was announced, allowing firewalls with SmallWall preloaded to be purchased. Their web store is here.

6 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. This is not ready for prime-time by weilawei · · Score: 2

    User Handbook (single page) - Comming Soon!

    Alright then, so there's no updated docs. I'll just click the handy link to The m0n0wall Documentation Project - Chris Buechler. Oh wait, it's a 404. Nice going guys.

    1. Re: This is not ready for prime-time by weilawei · · Score: 3, Informative

      The page actually exists. The link on the documentation page is incorrect. They used a relative link to something that should have been an absolute link.

      href="m0n0wall-docs.smallwall.org"

  2. so lean, many small by fisted · · Score: 2

    small and lean firewall

    improvements to the GUI

    Uh-huh.

    --
    CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
  3. Also, bug in summary by weilawei · · Score: 2

    Company is MITXPC, not MIXTPC. One seemingly refers to a small form factor PC and the other to a mix of toilet paper and crap.

  4. To the people who tagged this story... by toadlife · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...about a fork of one of the most popular (and awesome) FreeBSD-based firewall distros with the tag 'linux'...kindly die in a fire.

    Thank you.

    --
    I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
  5. Re:OPNsense by houstonbofh · · Score: 3
    If you read his final notice at http://m0n0.ch/wall/freeze_ann... you will see more then OPNsense.

    Hello,

    as announced earlier, the m0n0wall mailing list and forum are now frozen. This is the final message, and I would like to take the opportunity to thank all those who have sent me emails with kind words and expressions of gratitude. They were too numerous for me to reply to individually, but they were all very much appreciated!

    There have been some questions on what the way forward is for current m0n0wall users. If you are happy with the current feature set of m0n0wall and just need a security patch, bug fix, hardware compatibility update or minor improvement now and then, there are two nascent projects started by former m0n0wall developers/users that may have something for you: SmallWall and t1n1wall.

    For a more feature-rich alternative that is still based on FreeBSD and has the same roots, both pfSense and OPNsense (which is a fork of the former) are excellent choices. They have higher hardware requirements than m0n0wall, but on the other hand, a lot of new embedded hardware has recently become available, with 2 GB or more of memory and 1 GHz or faster CPUs, at a similar price as earlier platforms. It makes sense (pun intended) to use these additional resources - something that m0n0wall hasn't been particularly good at in recent times. Just keep that in mind for your next hardware upgrade.

    Farewell, fellow m0n0wall enthusiasts.

    - Manuel
    28 February 2015

    Both SmallWall and t1n1wall.com are lean, and purpose built firewalls that do only one thing. They are not kitchen sink applications. They are meant to plug into web filters, not to be web filters.

    pfSense, and OPNsense are extensible firewalls with a plug in architecture. While expandable, they are more complex and heavier weight. A good example is to compare traffic shaping between them... M0n0wall, SmallWall and t1n1wall will win that contest hands down!