After setting up a good LAN I wanted utilize it fully with a good software UTM Firewall. There are some requirements:
- Ability handle Vlan
- Contentfiltering (preferably with different filters on vlans)
- Addblocking
- GUI – even though I like Linux, I prefer GUI over CLI
- Be able to run in VMWare
I had some experience with PFSense, so why not start with that, I had some issues with setting up Vlan in the beginning (turned out to be rookie mistakes 😉 ) But luckily I was able to find a good guide on both PFsense and Vlan; I can only recommend Calvins guide
I played around with PFSense for a while and it has a lot of features, some of them way above my level of competency and it can be tricky to configure -good guides can be found by googling 😉
It seemed there was some issues with Squid and Squidguard causing trouble when rebooting the firewall.
I then turned to Untangle, it has a very nice gui and easy to configure, it has content filtering and a separate add-blocker. It wasn’t until my 30-day trial expired and I had to use the free/lite version I discovered that you can only setup on policy and not separate policies per Vlan.
Currently I can live with that but I’m exploring other options and have been looking at ClearOS community edition and http://www.nethserver.org/
I have been running both in a test environment in VMWare but still haven’t made a descision, I hope to rate them later.