Hardware Firewall VS Software firewall

[Squirrelington]

"what i'm setting up is on a low end budget just based on where it is."

If you on a shoe string budget, I would really suggest you look into setting up a linux distro to be used as your networks gateway/firewall.

I would suggest pfsense, but you could also take a look at ipcop, smoothwall, m0n0wall, etc. There are plenty of linux distro gateway/firewalls out there - many designed to run on older pc hardware, but can also be bought/installed on an appliance. This pretty much what sonicwall is, software running on dedicated hardware.

This is what every hardware firewall is -- software running on dedicated hardware. Be it the software is loaded from a true HDD, or nvram, CF, etc.

If you on a budget you can not beat the power you can get with something like pfsense running on some throw away PC you had laying around.. Mine is running on a old p3 - 800, with 256MB of ram and an old 6GB HDD.

You will be amazed at the ease of use and depth of features available and speed -- even on older hardware.

keep in mind if you want to start getting real fancy with IPS/IDS (snort), ntop, squid, squidguard (web content filtering), antivirus proxy, vpn endpoint, modsecurity package (web application firewall), IP Blacklist, hardware failover (CARP), etc. etc.. then you might need some more horse power and ram to allow for more features.. How many users, what bells and whistles you want to use would determine the level of cpu and ram you would need to handle number of users and bandwidth, etc.

To be honest really easy/cheap way for home users or ma an pop shops or even bigger companies to get the power and functionality of a hardware firewalls for FREE ;)

+100, always a good source of information. I am running a debian distro right now as my router/firewall/squid proxy. Works wonders.

[Mando]

I go for hardware firewall over software firewall all the time.

+1