IPFire User Thread

robbo100

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Hi all,

I thought I would post on here to see if anyone in the community uses IPFire for their home router solution?

Basically, for those who don't know, IPFire is an open source Linux based firewall, run from a small low powered computer, which will allow you to create multiple networks in lieu of a normal router.

A while back, I decided that I had given my wifi password to so many people (friends/babysitters etc), that I had lost track of who might be able to access my network. Clearly I wouldn't give out my password to someone I didn't trust, but it always niggled me a bit. So, had a play with a Raspberry Pi 1, to see whether I could use it in combination with my ISPs router, to provide a guest wifi network, firewalled from the main home LAN. It worked really well, but the RPi is slow and only has a 10/100 NIC (and also the SD card didn't like power cuts), so I decided to take the plunge and move onto something a little more adventurous.

I bought a second hand Wyse Thin Client for £35 from ebay (Z90D7 with a 20Gb SD drive), and have installed IPFire. I have also bought a cheap (£8) USB 3.0 10/100/1000 NIC.

My setup:

- USB NIC -> directly to my ISP modem in PPPoE mode, which provides the internet connection to the house (Red Network).
- Onboard Wired NIC -> to a network switch connected to the private LAN (Green Network)
- Onboard WiFi NIC -> configured as the guest WiFi (Blue Network).

So far, so good. I have enhanced firewall protection from the internet, and firewalled internet access only to my guests via WiFi. While concurrently running parental control, VPN access, and a whole load more for the household.

It seems really stable, and anecdotally, my internet speeds see slightly increased (and the network seems far more stable. WiFi access points aren't dropping out like they used to and my Macs seem to play far better over the Network with my PCs!

Does anyone else use IPFire? (or any other similar software, like PFSense)
 
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Smoothwall also used to offer something similar (turnkey Linux distribution run on a PC - the free one is called Smoothwall Express.) Whisper it quietly, but a lot of SOHO routers are running Linux, albeit on a specialised hardware platform. I'm suspicious my FreeSat box is Linux too - it seems to be all over the place these days.
 
@mickevh

I am sure there are loads of companies out there which offer turnkey solutions, but this is Open Source and free.

I am not part of the IPFire team, just someone who has started using it recently and I thought I would see if there were others out there who also dabble with this sort of stuff.

You are likely right, that loads of these set top boxes and routers etc are based on Linux distros nowadays. I was keen to have a play and see whether I could create the function of a £200+ bit of networking kit for under £40, and I think the results are fairly good.
 
Thanks - likewise I've no association with Smoothwall (apart from having used their products for while.) I know SmoothWall Express is free, though I've no idea if it's open source. I just though I'd mention it in the context of this thread as you seemed to be interested in free Firewall products.

Being software based, these things tend to be rather more feature rich (and often extensible.) In a business environment, I'm of the view that a big advantage of a software product over a dedicated hardware appliance is that if the box goes "bang" one day, (I've seen it happen,) all I've got to do is find another PC (any PC with enough NIC's, RAM and CPU horsepower) install the software, restore the ruleset and we're off and running again much quicker that if I've got to call out an engineer to come and fix my appliance based solution. Of course, that's of less import for SOHO.
 
I use openwrt on my access points to provide vlan for guest networks. Running a linksys router that supports vlan
 

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