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It’s official. I am now using Smoothwall firewall at home. I made the switch yesterday afternoon. Now, I feel fairly secure about my home network. I have several systems at home running different flavors of Linux plus a laptop on a wireless network. Prior to the switch, I had a Netgear wireless router that acted as a router, firewall and a wireless access point.

I am sure the Netgear box product protected me adequately from the outside world, but I really wanted a dedicated industrial strength firewall for my home network. You are probably wondering why? Hey, why not! Actually, two years ago, an Indonesian kid hacked into my Linux box. All the more reason to put an industrial strength firewall. So, I searched online for a Linux firewall that is GNU GPL or public license software that I can possibly use, then I stumbled upon Smoothwall.

I downloaded, installed and tested it on my development PC. Of course, this was all an educational experience for me since I have never built a firewall system from scratch. I have a fairly good understanding how firewalls work, but have never really administered one extensively. The Smoothwall firewall comes with a web administration interface that is relatively easy to learn and manage. The true test of how good a user interface is how many times do you refer back to the documentation. In this case, I only went only once. So far, so good.

Then came the switch. I placed the new firewall in between the Netgear router and the internet. The Smoothwall firewall would act as a buffer between my network and the wireless access point router. I left the wireless network intact so that the existing wireless network and wireless clients goes undisturbed. I did have a slight problem connecting to the internet. The DSL modem would not work with the PPPoE configuration of the firewall. After several tries, I finally got it to work. Wala! The DSL modem dialed and connected.

One of the nice features of Smoothwall is IDS or Intrusion Detection System. It keeps an activity log on all ports of the firewall. After a day, I surprised to see many intrusions on my internet port. Now that I have knowledge and exposure to what’s going on my internet port, I strongly recommend installing a firewall between your computer and the internet.