Comment OpenBSD (Score 3) 139
OpenBSD is the most secure OS around today. You can make an excellent firewall with it. If you don't know much about your network security, you need to get working on it. DL the install disk, do an FTP install on an old machine, and get learning how to set it up.
I've been using it for five months and it is awesome. Easy to install (newbies: be sure to read the directions), everything works without a lot of messing around (something I can't say about the other freenixes I've tried), and version 2.6 now has OpenSSH to allow you to securely administer your machine (not like it needs much once you have it up and running). Just check out ipnat (network address translation) and ipf (packet filtering) on the OpenBSD website (the man pages are the place to look) for more information
It is definitely better to run a basic OpenBSD firewall than to have Linux, Windoze, Solaris, or whatever else hooked up directly to the pipe. Run it on as little as a 486 with 8MBs RAM and a 200MB HD (you could probably run it on less, but I have only used it with the above minimum hardware). And if you really wanna get funky, run it as your workstation. Lotsa of programs have been ported to it, and the rest you can run using Linux emulation.
Check it out: http://www.openbsd.org/
Also, for those of you interested in OpenSSH outside of OpenBSD use: http://www.openssh.org/
For those of you with lingering doubts about ease of installation: five months ago when I first put it up, I was virtually clueless about Unix. I had muddled around with several Linux distros (Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Turbo, Suse, Caldera, and Corel to be precise) but none of them worked as flawlessly as many Linux proponents say (two of them crashed on me (Mandrake and Corel), and many times library inconsistencies made my life a living hell when installing software from the Internet). It took me two weeks of spare time to figure out enough about OpenBSD to go ahead and install it with ipnat and ipf enabled. Since then I have learnt more about packet filtering in my spare time and tightened things up further. The machine has been going for 5 months strong and only came down once because I wanted to upgrade it to OpenBSD 2.6. In short, if I could get it running in two weeks, any regular moron should be able to do it in one, and any Unix knowledgable person should be able to get it going in a couple of hours.
I've been using it for five months and it is awesome. Easy to install (newbies: be sure to read the directions), everything works without a lot of messing around (something I can't say about the other freenixes I've tried), and version 2.6 now has OpenSSH to allow you to securely administer your machine (not like it needs much once you have it up and running). Just check out ipnat (network address translation) and ipf (packet filtering) on the OpenBSD website (the man pages are the place to look) for more information
It is definitely better to run a basic OpenBSD firewall than to have Linux, Windoze, Solaris, or whatever else hooked up directly to the pipe. Run it on as little as a 486 with 8MBs RAM and a 200MB HD (you could probably run it on less, but I have only used it with the above minimum hardware). And if you really wanna get funky, run it as your workstation. Lotsa of programs have been ported to it, and the rest you can run using Linux emulation.
Check it out: http://www.openbsd.org/
Also, for those of you interested in OpenSSH outside of OpenBSD use: http://www.openssh.org/
For those of you with lingering doubts about ease of installation: five months ago when I first put it up, I was virtually clueless about Unix. I had muddled around with several Linux distros (Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Turbo, Suse, Caldera, and Corel to be precise) but none of them worked as flawlessly as many Linux proponents say (two of them crashed on me (Mandrake and Corel), and many times library inconsistencies made my life a living hell when installing software from the Internet). It took me two weeks of spare time to figure out enough about OpenBSD to go ahead and install it with ipnat and ipf enabled. Since then I have learnt more about packet filtering in my spare time and tightened things up further. The machine has been going for 5 months strong and only came down once because I wanted to upgrade it to OpenBSD 2.6. In short, if I could get it running in two weeks, any regular moron should be able to do it in one, and any Unix knowledgable person should be able to get it going in a couple of hours.
