New Architect > Archives > 2001 > 09 > Infrastructure Product Review

Build Your Own Firewall

By Brian Wilson

MandrakeSoft built its reputation with Mandrake, one of the most easily installed Linux distributions. Mandrake Single Network Firewall (SNF) claims to make setting up and managing a firewall just as easy.

All recent Linux distributions include the basic tools for building a firewall, but configuration is still a very big task. I'd like to tell you that MandrakeSoft practically fought its way out of the box and onto my network, but that just wasn't what happened.

Getting SNF running was easy, but to make it work properly, I had to draw on considerable knowledge of Linux and networks. If you don't want to spend any time reading the Linux HowTo documents and learning about firewalls, I highly recommend that you invest in a $200 SOHO gateway router such as those available from Linksys or Asante. A gateway router performs only network address translation (NAT) and simple packet filtering. NAT makes computers inside your LAN unreachable from the Internet on all but selected ports. For example, you can designate one machine to be a Web server and allow access to it only on port 80 for HTTP connections. This is all that most people need for a home office.

Mandrake Single Network Firewall 7.2