Are you using a firewall on your Internet connection at home? If not, you NEED to read on. If you are using one, you NEED to read on. An Internet firewall is a layer of protection for your home computer(s) that will minimize outside attacks. Compare it with the front door of your house, you wouldn’t leave your home and leave the front door wide open for anyone to come in at will, would you? You should use the same mentality with your home network.

For home use, there’s basically only 3 different types of firewalls you can get:

1) A software firewall installed on your PC
2) A software firewall installed on a dedicated PC
3) a hardware firewall

Most folks use either #1 or #3 at home. #1 is basically something like the built-in Windows firewall software or a firewall product that may come with your virus scanner. Typically not very safe. You really don’t want to have the firewall protection software installed on the same PC it’s trying to protect. It’s better than nothing, but not the best choice.

#3 is usually what you’ll get if you buy a home router/firewall/wireless access point product from vendors like Linksys or Netgear. These are dedicated hardware devices with a slimmed down firewall, which mainly provides address translation features (allows you to connect more than one PC up to the internet) and maybe some port forwarding functionality. Not much to them though. Better than #1, but still quite limiting.

The best choice I’ve seen by far is what you can get by going with a software-based firewall product on a dedicated PC. It offers a high level of configurability, solid firewall features, and robust performance even on older hardware.

I’ve used many different products in the past (Freesco and Smoothwall to name a few), but none of them have offered up the amount of features and simplicity of use that my current firewall does. The Astaro Security Gateway is hands down my favorite firewall to date. I’ve had coworkers tell me that you can get a decent amount of functionality from a Linksys router flashed with a custom firmware, but Astaro’s products aren’t hacks…this is the real deal coming from a proven security company.

How about some features:

• Anti-Spam & Phishing
• Dual Virus Protection
• Transparent Encryption
• Intrusion Prevention
• Remote access & VPN
• IM & P2P Control
• Content Filtering
• Anti-Virus & Spyware
• URL Filtering

And believe me there’s more. Built on a Linux platform, and using Webmin for the management interface, this software allows you to do QoS shaping, which I’ve used to give our Vonage VoIP service a guaranteed amount of bandwidth. It gives you the ability to define networks, protocols, individual hosts, and then add them to rules at will. It even functions as a DNS server for your internal network (no more hosts files) and will forward DNS requests out to your ISP for stuff it can’t resolve on the inside.

Logs? Wow this thing has a lot of logging and reporting capabilities. From watching live feeds of log files as they’re updating, to graphs showing utilization, there’s plenty of information available. It even has a number of nice dashboards to look at.

I love the web filter features, which provide content caching, content filtering, virus scanning (it pre-downloads your stuff, virus scans it twice with two different engines, and then allows you access), url blacklists, plus more.

There’s so much in this product out of the box, you’d need to add in a LOT of plugins and hacks into a product like Smoothwall to get the same functionality. My favorite feature of the Astaro Security Gateway firewall software….. it’s FREE for home use.

Check it out if you’re looking for a solid firewall product with loads of features.

http://www.astaro.com

Thanks go to Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson of the TWiT:Security Now Netcast for introducing me to this product.

Technorati Tags: astaro, astaro.com, firewall, freesco, Leo Laporte, Linux, nat, port forwarding, router, security, security now, smoothwall, Steve Gibson, twit

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