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With the URLfilter addon installed, an IPcop firewall can be turned into a free content-filtering web gateway perfect for a church, non-profit organization or home office. Access to inappropriate sites whether they be pornagraphic or just not work-related will be denied automatically at the firewall. Both IPcop and URLfilter are free to download and use.

Why IPcop?
IPcop differs from most internet routers and firewalls because it has proxy software built-in. At first glance, a proxy server doesn’t do anything more than a standard router. Both will allow multiple computers inside the network to access websites on the internet, but a proxy servers looks at the actual web address in order to get a web page. For example, a standard router will recognize that a computer is visiting a website out on the internet whereas a proxy server understands that a computer is visiting www.MSN.com/music or www.msn.com/jobs. By looking at the full web address, IPcop can create internet access logs accurate down to the actual web page that was visited. IPcop and other free firewalls are compared in this article.
Another handy trick that IPcop can do is proxy web traffic transparently. Most proxy servers require users to make configuration changes to Internet Explorer or Firefox to use them, but that is not the case with IPcop. Web traffic can be proxied, logged and filtered without any configuration at the workstation and most users will never know that their web traffic is being analyzed. If a network administrator is just interested in keeping a detailed web access log, then IPcop can do that by? default. URL Filter adds the filtering capability.
Why URL filter?
URL filter (Short for Universal Resource Locater Filter) just adds a module to IPcop that helps it make decisions on whether to process a computer request for a web page. It makes decisions two ways. It keeps a list of known unacceptable websites and blocks those and it keeps a list of bad words and blocks anything with one of those bad words in the name. URL filter can be configured to download new lists of bad words and sites automatically.

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Firewall companies have a little secret that they do not want you know: most of their software is based on free open source software. What you pay the firewall companies for is the assembly of the software, an intuitive interface and professional technical support. And what they really want to keep a secret is the fact that several free firewall distributions assemble the software and create an intuitive interface for free also.
Using one of these free firewall systems will give you many great business class features without the hefty business class price tag. These firewalls are a perfect choice for small businesses on a shoestring budget.
Why Upgrade to Open Source?
Increased Bandwidth: Most home routers have enough horsepower for a standard cable or DSL connection, but may slow you down on new ultra-high connections like Verizon’s FIOS or ATT’s Uverse.
Upgraded connections limits: Internet routers have to track all of the connections that all of the computers on its network make to the internet and that number of connections can really add up as more computers are added to the network. Each of these connections have to be stored in the router’s memory and small home routers typically don’t have a ton of memory. Applications like bittorrent that make thousands of connections to other computers on the internet can choke a router and make your internet connection feel slow.
Advanced Quality of Service (QoS): If your teenager is sucking up all of the bandwidth by downloading music and movies all day, finding a router that supports QoS or traffic shaping will help. It allows you classify which internet traffic takes priority and allows you to put all of your web surfing ahead of their downloads. This is especially helpful with applications like bittorrent that suck bandwidth and internet phones that don’t like latency.
Web access logging: Firewalls can track where users go on the internet and keep a log of it without the need to install software on every computer.
Web Content filtering: In addition to logging web traffic, some routers can dynamically block objectionable web traffic based on keywords or a database of known questionable websites. And there is no need to install filtering software on each individual PC.

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Cisco announced the End of Life for the PIX firewall without much fanfare, replacing the line with their new Adaptive Security Appliance line. Astaro Firewalls has jumped in to seize the moment and has offered a 20% discount on their all-in-one Firewall/VPN solution.

I found this article on Associated Content that describes several open source firewalls and compares them to commercially available firewalls. It makes a solid argument for free firewalls in most places except large enterprise. Take a look at Build your own firewall.

[tags]IPcop, Monowall, Pfsense, linux, Smoothwal, firewall, web filtering[/tags]

I recently had to go in and recent the password on a redundant pair of Secure Computing G2 firewalls. It was fairly straight forward and simple enough, but I still wanted to document it here:

First boot or reboot the firewall,. When you see the “loading/boot…” message appear, press any key to interrupt the boot cycle.
Next, you will see the Boot: prompt. Type in the following command:
bsd.sw.admin -w
This will boot the firewall into Administrative/Maintenance kernel.

Hit Enter to mount and check all of the file systems. Clean file systems are always a good thing.

After that, use the following command to change the password:

cf adminuser modify user=name password=password

And to reboot into normal mode, type: shutdown -r now

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