Review: SmoothWall Express 2.0

In these days of always-on Internet connections, a firewall that protects your network from unauthorized access is indispensable. Though most home routers have some sort of basic firewall capabilities, their rules for incoming and outgoing traffic are often basic and arbitrary. An alternative is to run a Linux-based firewall on old hardware, but configuring this sort of setup is generally not easy. An exception is SmoothWall, a free application you can install on any old machine to convert it to a dedicated hardware firewall. SmoothWall has a friendly interface and more configuration options than standard hardware firewalls.

The download for SmoothWall Express 2.0 is a mere 45MB, 12MB of which is documentation in PDF format. I installed it on an 800MHz Pentium III box with 128 MB SDRAM, a 20GB hard drive, and three network cards (one onboard, two PCI). This hardware is more powerful than the software’s minimum requirements — you can run it on anything upwards of a Pentium with 32MB of RAM and a 540MB hard drive.

The installation is easy, thanks to the excellent documentation provided. During the installation, SmoothWall formats the hard drive, with no options to save any data or make custom partitions. You must choose what kind of network interfaces — Ethernet, ISDN, or USB ADSL — you will be using. I chose the Ethernet option. Next, you choose the type of the firewall. There are two options: green-red, where one interface is connected to the Internet (red) and the other is connected to your network (green), and green-orange-red, where you can put any servers that require external access, such as Web or mail servers, in the orange zone. Servers in the orange zone are fully accessible from both the red (Internet) and green (local network) zones, but no machines in the orange zone can access resources in the green zone. The orange zone is also known as the demilitarized zone or DMZ.

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