Best firewalls (hardware)

What do you think are the best small business firewalls? (up to 100 employees) I'm thinking of hardware (routers... etc)

Currently we have the firebox soho6 (router/firewall,) which seems good, but is proprietary, upgrades cost $ - the unit was around $300 when we purchased about 18 months ago.

I've also used Linksys wrv54g and wrt54g. I think these have pretty standard firewall features. Any advantages to the more expensive units?

In fact, the DLink DI524 seems fine too. Any disadvantage to going with a unit like this? For the $$ it seems pretty hard to beat.

I haven't seen any real advantage to the soho6. It has a maintenance feature that allows a vpn client. Thats about all I can think of.

Also, I've been hearing about the barracuda firewall. From my reading, it sounds like something this advanced is mostly for companies that do hosting or have bigger networks than what I'm looking at. What do you think?

Also, are there any stand alone firewalls (no router) worth mention? Does that even exist?

Thanks in advance to anyone who contributes!
J

 

The Linksys WRT54G Ver. 4 and older would be good for a small business because they have a lot of custom firmware's available ( http://www.wrt54g.net/ ). I have several setup running the DD-WRT firmware and they have been trouble free.

Another alternative is to setup a Linux box for a firewall. Thats what I actually use in my office but it's much more complicated and you would need a tech with Linux experience or rely on a company like SmoothWall.

 

If you have some 'old' hardware Smoothwall.org is a good firewall..
there is a free version that has many features and nice interface - easy to setup also.. I like it.. there are other solutions like it IPCOP.. ect..

 

Is there a standard for processor speed for something like Smoothwall? Obviously my old Pentium 60Mhz is not upto speed. It seems like I heard once that a Cisco router was the equilivant of a P3 500Mhz. Sound about right?

 

From their site...."SmoothWall Express is intended for use by anyone from a home user to a systems administrator. It can run on almost any PC from a 486 upwards, which becomes a dedicated firewall appliance (the SmoothWall box). Apart from the PC, all that is required is an Internet connection and some simple networking equipment to connect the SmoothWall firewall to the rest of your local, private network. "

Min 486sx with 64MB RAM & 512MB HDD....

 

No doubt, SmoothWall would work but I wouldn't go too low end on the computer. The system I run is an old AMD K6-2 500 with 256 RAM and a 20Gig HD. I also use it as an FTP server, hence the big HD but I would plan ahead for upgrades and improvements in technology. I wouldn't set it up on anything less then 300Mhz with 128RAM and at least a 6Gig HD. I know their spec says it will run on much less but you will see a difference in your internet speed with what I have proposed and their minimum.

 

I've heard on systems that filter spam/spy/virus from the tcp/ip traffic. Does smoothwall do this? I couldn't find any info about this on their site.
J

 

Filtering would be a subscription type service to be added to a firewall. I think InstaGate is one of the higher rated ones providing these services.