Wanted to try out one of the Open Source firewalls, and for this test I selected IPFire. For other candidates see links.
I installed IPFire on a miniPC using JetKVM. The mini PC is from Ebay and has the following specs, to those interested to know:
Model: HP EliteDesk 800 G1
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570S CPU
Memory: 8GB
Disk: 100GB
USB-NIC: TP-link UE300 (USB3 Gigabit Ethernet)
In IPFire the untrusted network (internet) is colored RED, and the trusted network (intranet) is GREEN. There two NIC (Network Interface Cards) are needed.
Some of the features I was testing:
- Captive Portal
- Web Proxy with URL filter
- Location Block
- IP Address Blocklist
- OpenVPN
- Intrusion Prevention System
Here are some screenshots:
Status -> Services
Network -> Captive Portal
Firewall -> IP Address Blocklist
Firewall -> Intrusion Prevention System
All-in-all quite many features in IPFire. To better master it would take a lot of time, but for the test purposes it was very interesting to try out and learn about. It didn’t seem too difficult to set-up for home networks.
I think I will be using the OpenVPN in the future to test different things.
Links:
https://www.ipfire.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_and_firewall_distributions