[adsl] Looking for ADSL VPN Router recommendations

[David Hawke]

Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
>> At the risk of sounding biased, why not put low to mid range linux 
>> boxes in as firewall / VPN managers / routers.
>>
>> PII 400 / 64Mb RAM / 10Gb disks with your favourite distribution ... 
>> or possibly ipcop ... do marvellously.
>>     
>
> A Linux distribution has the downside of needing a huge amount of time
> to set up when compared to a ready-to-roll firewall application which
> has its own Linux/BSD included. I advise against ipcop for anything
> exceeding home use because of a lacking feature set (no outbound
> filtering), confusing BUI, and instability (add-ons segfault, a
> /dev/null for a security appliance as far as I am concerned). pfsense is
> *much* niftier but doing everything means it's more difficult to set up.
> Even Endian beats ipcop in design. Those are the 3 choices I could find
> (let me know if I missed any pls). Any medium/low PC will do, and you
> still need an adsl modem.
>
> The advantage of a dedicated all-in-one hardware box is small size and
> low power consumption, but you're subjecting yourself to the whims of
> its firmware and there are basically no security updates available. I
> don't believe these boxes never have bugs.
>
>   
All true - the most time consuming bit is getting iptables set up ... 
but I guess I did that so long ago that different configs are really 
just a tweak these days. I'm not keen on ipcop either.

Certainly the advantage of going down the Linux path is the flexibility 
- for example to put squid / dansguardian in place to handle the web 
content, add an mta / dspam /clamav to manage mail, and samba to manage 
file print.

DavidH