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Corporate Firewall

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by sawan gupta

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I am working as a Project Manager in my Company.
The Project which I am managing is to suggest a software firewall to my Company.

My Company is a cellular Service Provider in India.
It has several dial up servers and 32 Real IP on the Internet. Since the risk is maximum here which is to be minimized.

My Work is to evaluate various software/hardware firewall products and suggest a Firewall Soln to the Company.

Please provide me with some suggestions for the above mentioned problem.

7 replies

by lordinfidel

That is my first part of the advice.

Once you figure out your budget then you can go from there.

If money is no object, then the defacto hardware based firewall standard in the corporate world is CheckPoint. Licensing fees are very high though, but it is extremely reliable and stable.

For a small IT budget without the big licensing fees everytime you turn around. SonicWall's Soho3 would be ideal.

Or if you want to go even cheaper and you are a do-it-your selfer type of guy.

There is nothing wrong about getting a decent machine, run linux on it, use IPTables and build your own firewall.

In fact most firewalls just run a unix type kernel. It is the front end interface, the modules built into it like IpSec, the embedded hardware based OS, that makes the other firewalls cost more. But you can achieve the exact same thing with linux and iptables.

by sawan gupta

Budget is no constraint for us.
All we need is the best quality and best security which can provide in the company.

by lordinfidel

Then go with checkpoint.

You will probably need a engineer to help you set it up initially.

Go to the following link,

http://cgi.us.checkpoint.com/locator/AdvancedSearch.asp

This will give you companies in your area that are authorized to sell and deploy checkpoint products.

if you are looking for the best, reliable secure solution. Then checkpoint is it.

The price is based on #of IP address it is securing. But if you find a rep they can go over all of the pricing with you and find the best set-up for you.

We switched to checkpoint about 4 years ago and used a company called Mission Critical. They are based in the US though. But we also fall into the enterprise class so our's was quite expensive.

The small business class is around the 5k range. But that is without hardware and without installation.

by sawan gupta

I had a talk with System Admin.
Our Budget has been fixed to 4500$ and we need to secure 5 systems. (4 dial up servers and one internet leased line).

What i have thought till now is to submit a combined soln of hardware and software firewall.

by lordinfidel

The license model goes on how many address' you need to secure. Not systems.

So if you only have 5 public address' then there you go.

If you have /25 or a full /24 then it will run you some more.

You can also look at sonic wall.

Or you can go the linux route. If you go linux, it is free. And there is a nifty gui based tool for linux called fwbuilder (fwbuilder.org).

It is similiar to the way checkpoint looks when building a ruleset. Basically, fwbuilder let's you build a ruleset, then converts that ruleset to your kernel and platform and firewall type.

Like a 2.2+ kernel on BSD using IPtables. It will compile the ruleset for you. You just need to install it. Which is not that difficult. Just make the file executable, thow it in your start up files (usually /etc/rc.d/rc3.d) I typically put the file in /etc/init.d) and then soft link to it from rc3.d [rc5 if you boot into the gui, but not recc for a fwl].

by sawan gupta

Curently all are Window NT/XP Based systems but there also should be a functionality to support Linux since it might be implemented soon as servers in the organization.

by lordinfidel

Now granted there *is* a learning curve. And is typically harder to learn if you are coming from the windows world to linux.

My advice would be to get a copy of RedHat. Which is very user friendly.

here is some sites:
http://www.linuxnewbie.org/
http://www.kernel.org/links.html
http://www.linuxdoc.org/
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~dranch/LINUX/TrinityOS/cHTML/TrinityOS-c.html

Also get yourself the following books from O'reilly:
Running Linux
Linux Administrators Guide

And picking up the Red Hat Linux Bible won't hurt either.

I originally learned it the hard and hurtful way, command line only. If I was new again seeing linux for the first time. I would install it with the gui (gnome or KDE), and then use the terminal to navigate. Knowing that I can see where I am going graphically.

The hardest thing about linux is figuring out the file system. Once you get that down, the rest is easy.

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