Hardware Firewall

Hello Westley,

You might want to check out Watchguard.
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Cisco PIX 515 series

SonicWall - Not sure. Been awhile.

Better question for the 100 folks using this firewall would be:

- VPN?

- Email and or Web servers requiring a DMZ

- VLAN? Which your hinting at a bit with the amount of access though there are a number of ways to implement this strategy.

- What security appliances are installed now?

- Do you need IPSec or SSL VPN with or without VLAN.

- How much growth do you plan to allow for?

- How comfortable are you with the idea of installing this yourself? Maint contract?

All these things need to be considered before ordering any appliance.

- beads

You current requirement will be adequately covered by a D-Link-DFL700...it will easily cope with 1,500 connections and additional 200 VPN connections, with up to offline 500 system user Radius Database. There no limitation posed by the user utilizing LUA or full access. This is serious hardware firewall equipment for major corporate security. See specs on the web.

The watchguard firewalls are pretty good but the user interface is clunky and not very intuative. PIX by Cisco are up there with the best firewalls, specially if you want a applicance, although you need a bit more knowledge with a PIX. another good option is Netscreen, they have the best of both worlds, good features and functionality and also a good user interface.

Get an old Pentium or P2 system and install something like Smoothwall Linux on it. It'll easily handle your load and needs. You could run a significant corporate network on a P2 366MHz with 512MB of RAM using Smoothwall. Here's the Smoothwall website's opening statement about Smoothwall Express, sorta the "beginner's" version:

[i]SmoothWall Express is an open source firewall distribution based on the GNU/Linux operating system. Linux is the ideal choice for security systems; it is well proven, secure, highly configurable and freely??? available as open source code. SmoothWall includes a hardened subset of the GNU/Linux operating system, so there is no separate OS to install. Designed for ease of use, SmoothWall is configured via a web-based GUI, and requires absolutely no knowledge of Linux to install or use.[/i]

It sounds like you might have need of the corporate version, and you can get it with support from smoothwall.net to ensure you don't have any problems implementing and maintaining it.

There are a lot of other Linux-based firewall solutions out there. In fact, if you go to CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's, or any of a number of other such stores, you'll probably find a couple of router/firewall appliances on the shelves that run a stripped-down Linux kernel.

If you want total functionality for totally free, go with IPCop instead of Smoothwall. You won't get the corporate support you could have from Smoothwall, but it's every bit as capable, and the free support you can get from the Linux community (once you get familiar with how to make use of the resource) is pretty much unmatched. It's absurdly easy to install and administrate, and provides a significant amount of control over the firewalling functionality of the system. For the price of an old Pentium II computer that's sitting in the closet waiting to be tossed out, you could have all the capability of a Cisco firewall appliance that would cost you thousands of dollars to acquire.

Easy to use, many good features and tools.

If your looking to allow 'as in office' access Aventail offers a good solution. Pricing is a bit steep but has alot of options for security. www.aventail.com