Cool project!

[Jawsh]

Hi there! I'm a bit new to the linux age, been playing with it for a bit but still new. I hope some of yall could help me find some help or documentation on this subject.

 

I will be attending college soon and they have their own "high speed internet access" in each dorm room provided by the campus. I know my way around windows and I know that in windows if you share a network connection, things can get nasty... put lightly. I'm not sure how they have it subnetted if it is per room or not, but I do not want to take any chances. I will have a notebook which will likely have windows installed (though I will try out FC, Suse, and the like first) and I want to make a linux firewall/router/virus/spyware scanner. It doesnt NEED to be a router, it can be a bridging firewall, but the router option is just something to play with (I could add dhcp and html servers... hehe). Is having a firewall with a virus/spyware scanner irrational or can it be done? I kinda want to make it an access point as well.

 

Anybody have any suggestions? Maybe a new approach all together? Which distro to use? :P

 

Oh couple more things I wanna squeeze into this post if its ok...

1.) What is the real difference in distrobutions on the CLI level? Is there one? Is the only thing that COULD be different the shells that they use?

2.) Is a bash shell in, say Ubuntu maybe, the same as it would be in perhaps Suse?

[hybrid]

Hello and welcome to the forums! :)

 

Smoothwall [/url][url=http://smoothwall.org/]http://smoothwall.org/ is apparently a superb setup for running a firewall - in fact I believe a Smoothwall box is protecting the site you're looking at now! I haven't used it myself, but I'm told it's awesome. I'll leave it to someone with a bit more experience with Smoothwall to go through that, though.

 

There is very little difference in the CLI between distributions. Commands for doing certain tasks where software is different (for example, you use rpm to install software on SUSE and dpkg on Ubuntu), but for the most part, learn the command line in one distro and you can move all that expertise over to another (and many other Unix-like systems too).

[anyweb]

yeah i'd recommend smoothwall too, here's a detailed review of it [/url][url=http://linux-noob.com/review/smoothwall/3/]http://linux-noob.com/review/smoothwall/3/

 

well worth checking out and yes, linux-noob.com is protected by a smoothwall firewall

 

cheers

anyweb

[magikman]

I am a BSD person, and as such, i would like to recommend pfsense. It is based off of FreeBSD 6.X and is, in my opinion, a much, much more robust and secure firewall solution than what smoothwall will ever be. Before you say that i haven't tried smoothwall, i have. Look at both solutions before you make your decision.

[anyweb]

can you expand on this ?

 

much, much more robust and secure firewall solution than what smoothwall will ever be

[Jawsh]

I'm interested as well, can you elaborate magikman?

[magikman]

Sorry it has taken me so long to respond to these posts, I have been busy and haven't had the time. I say that it is a much, much more robust firewall solution due to the MANY features available on this platform that just are not available on (a stock) smoothwall install. For instance, with pfsense you have dual-wan with auto fall over support, smoothwall (the last time I looked) can't even do this. Pfsense also has support for traffic shaping out-of-box, again, smoothwall doesn't. In addition to these features, it also has support for incoming load balancing, outgoing load balancing, CARP , etc. If you don