Andre Volmensky said on Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 04:11:14PM +1000: > What are the advantages of a linux firewall over something like Windows > with WinRoute on it, or even a hardware based firewall. What are the > disadvantages etc. I know I am asking on a linux users mailing list, but > I would also like reply's not to be too bias. I would say that the largest advantage of the hardware firewalls is stability: you don't have to worry about disk failure. Now, you can build a Linux firewall that loads off of a flash, but why bother when companies have done it for you (ImageStream's Rebel routers are an example of this, which I've personally used and am reasonably happy with). The largest disadvantage is lack of flexibility: if you want to do something that your hardware doesn't support, you're hosed. But, for firewalls, you generally don't want to do too much, so this isn't as much of a problem. For any small (read: DS3 or less), a PC based firewall will perform just as well as a hardware firewall. On the other hand, do you _want_ to be paged at 4am because your PC based firewall ate a disk? And for those who still think that hardware == telnet only, that's just not true anymore. All of the newer kit worth owning supports ssh (some even support ssh v2) out of the box. M
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