Tuesday, March 22 2005 @ 09:34 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
Linux.com details how to get a firewall up and running using mOnOwall.
M0n0wall is an open source firewall and wireless router developed by Manuel Kasper, built on a stripped-down FreeBSD operating system. M0n0wall offers many of the same features found in commercial firewalls products such as Check Point Firewall-1 and Cisco Pix, including stateful packet filtering. With it you can create a secure virtual private network (VPN) between two sites, or you can use m0n0wall as a VPN gateway, so you can access your LAN secure from the Internet. You can use RADIUS for client authentication in order to raise the security even higher.
M0n0wall has a nice Web interface for configuring firewall settings. Most of the configuration can be done via the Web interface and all the values are stored in a single XML file. The configuration can be saved on a diskette, hard disk, or external storage card. This makes it easy to deploy several firewalls with a similar hardware setup.
The firewall is stable, and looks like a commercial firewall; the only difference is its lack of a commercial price tag. I have used the m0n0 firewall on many different PC configurations for more than a year without any problems. As with all open source software, you can download a complete, non-crippled version of m0n0wall for evaluation and testing.
