New IPCop Firewall
January 18, 2008My latest project, to replace the bulky overpowered ISA firewall on my home network with a lean mean IPCop machine, was declared a great success a few days ago.
I am familiar with IPCop, as I used to use it a long time ago. Since then it has matured somewhat, but the feature set is pretty much the same as I remember. The new machine is a 400MHz PII, with 192mb RAM. It is sitting in the place of a Sempron 3000+ with 1GB RAM. Amazing, it’s doing the same job with a fraction of the power. And also, it uses a third of the electricity - 30W in total. Good news given the rise in energy prices!
The main challenge so far, which I still haven’t overcome, is how to get RoadWarrior VPN working, using the windows built-in VPN client, with L2TP/IPSec. This used to be trivial with ISA Server, but this isn’t quite the case with a linux firewall. I have been looking at other distributions such as monowall and pfSense, niether of which seem to spell out their ability to achieve this clearly. I am playing with a few of these on Virtual Machines, so hopefully I will come accross a way to do this before long - I’m starting to miss my RoadWarrior VPN server. How sad, eh?
