Unified Threat Management / Hardware Firewall

[Ahnzh]

Hey guys. When I was looking for Linux based router/gateway solutions I stumbled over the Sophos UTM home edition.

 

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-home-edition.aspx

 

 

I just wanted to share this with you since you get:

 

1. A hardware firewall
2. Gateway antivirus
3. Multiple WANs
4. Much more
5. A business grade UTM solution
6. All of the above for FREE!

It looks pretty insane, I have no clue how they do that but this really is an impressive package and instead of looking for pfSense or m0n0wall this thing is the real deal. 

 

It's limited to 50 IPs in your network but let's be honest, for home or small business use you will never reach more than 30ish IPs. 

 

 

I ordered an SuperMicro Board with an embedded Avoton (Server-Atom) C2550, 4GB RAM and a small SSD today to test this out since it really impressed me.

 

 

What do you think.

[Ahnzh]

I started a build log *here*

 

I would love to see some opinions here though

[wpirobotbuilder]

Wow. That's all I have to say. When I retire my current HP desktop (le shame) I'll probably have it do this (it's socket 775 and doesn't support virtualization, so it's useless for hosting VMs).

 

The access to your home network from anywhere seems like a good enough reason to get this, and lots of people have an old computer or parts that are just lying around.

 

Not sure how useful the aggregation of multiple internet connections is, though. How would you even get multiple internet connections to a single residence?

[Ahnzh]

Wow. That's all I have to say. When I retire my current HP desktop (le shame) I'll probably have it do this (it's socket 775 and doesn't support virtualization, so it's useless for hosting VMs).

 

The access to your home network from anywhere seems like a good enough reason to get this, and lots of people have an old computer or parts that are just lying around.

 

Not sure how useful the aggregation of multiple internet connections is, though. How would you even get multiple internet connections to a single residence?

let's have an example: you load a website. It contains different media (pictures, plain text, scripts et cetera). All of these media files can be loaded using different connections. So you can load 2 of these media files at the same time. Let's compare that to a large ISO or RAR file: you can only use one connection for that. Loading 2 large files will max out your connection though.

 

About the connections: mobile connections (4g, 3g), satellite connections, fibre connections, phone line connections are just some possibilities. You can combine them freely in number and in method. In the end it sort of works like NIC bonding in your network would .... a bit different though since it doesn't work when accessing your stuff from the webs. You could make that work as well but this gets difficult. Failover is more important than speeds.