[sclug] Firewalls

[James Fidell]

Quoting Will Dickson (wrd at glaurung.demon.co.uk):
> 13/01/2003 18:39:58, Tom Dawes-Gamble <tmdg at tmdg.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> >	I used to use a firewall that I built and configured from Rob's
> >book but then I found ipcop  see http://www.ipcop.org/ It loads much faster
> >than my home brew version.  I'm sure that it's more secure.  *AND* it's
> >much easier to administer.
> 
> It used to be claimed by www.smoothwall.org/ that ipcop consisted of some
> low-level ex-members of the smoothwall team who basically took the smoothwall
> codebase and then claimed all of it for their own work, when it wasn't.
> However, the rant which made this allegation (I paraphrase loosely) seems
> to have vanished from their site now, so I don't have a link. Or maybe
> they've sorted it out. 

IPCop was a project that split away from Smoothwall because (I believe)
of a slow rate of progress on Smoothwall itself.  Obviously it was heavily
based on Smoothwall code at the time of the split, and I've never seen
any attempt to claim otherwise.

A couple of weeks ago IPCop 1.2 was released, and I understand (possibly
erroneously) that this release no longer contains any code from the
Smoothwall project.

But all this is irrelevant really.  I've rolled my own firewalls in the
past (including proxy code) and they've worked fine.  They give you an
excellent understanding of (some of) what firewalls are about.  Unless
you specifically want to gain that education (and want to risk getting it
wrong, of course), IPCop is an excellent alternative.

Not that I personally consider IPCop to be perfect, but it is a good
start.

James