How do you protect your SOHO (Small Office / Home Office ) network?

What kind of protection do you have at your home or small office network? Are you using iptables? windows firewall or firewall of your adsl modem?

Now a days having just a firewall is not good enough for your protection. Actually you can also see this from the way open source firewall projects are evolving.
Let’s what is this article all about. I want protect my home network and I need more than a firewall.
I am looking for a solutions which:

• lets me shape the traffic
• provides gateway anti-virus ,  protection against to Phishing
• provides VPN access.
• content filtering.
• lets me shape my  traffic
• provides Spam filtering ( For my virtual servers.)
• provides intrusion detection and protection.

I can extend the list but as you can see these are the standard features of UTM (Unified Thread Management) solutions. You can buy a commercial solution from McAfee, Checkpoint etc. but I wanted to check if there are any free solutions.

After reading some articles and doing some search I ended up 5 free solutions meeting my requirements. I have to say almost all of them has even more features that I need.

	SmoothWall Express is the community edition of SmoothWall product.  It is developed by UK based private company. You can manage your firewall via web interface. Easy to install and easy to use solution.  For complete feature list click here.
	IPCop is originally a fork of SmoothWall project but it is an independent project. Right now it is quite different then SmoothWall solution. Also IPCop is administrated via web interface. For feature list click here.
	Endian is originally based on IPCop but now it is based on Linux from Scratch. It is developed by Italian Endial Srl and community. It comes with web based administration interface. Easy to use product. You can assing more than one ip numbers to an external interface. For feature list click here
	Untangle is open source gateway solution developed by a private company with same name. I didn’t have chance to try it but by looking at screenshots and feature list It gives the impression of a user friendly solution with interestingfeature set
	Vyatta they are using the “Open source replacement for Cisco” slogan. It is cisco like solution. For configuration you need to modify the config files using cisco syntax. It can be definitely interesting for business but for my purpose it was overkill.

I am currently using Endian solution. It is running as a KVM appliance. It doesn’t have acpid package installed. It is quite annoying that I can not reboot it from virsh but it was easy to implement and so far so good I don’t have any other problems with it.

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