SmoothWall Review

SmoothWall express 3.0 is a Linux distribution that is designed for usage as a firewall system. It uses the web based user interface which makes the system very easy to configure and someone with little Linux knowledge could easily configure the system. SmoothWall express 3 uses the Linux 2.6 Kernel and utilizes an intrusion detection system and other useful network services.

Installation
The SmoothWall guys have an excellent installation manual so I'm not going to rewrite it. I'll just say a few key things about it:

• The Install of SmoothWall will erase ALL DATA on the computer.
• The Install requires a dedicated computer with least 128 MB of memory and 2GB of hard drive space.
• One network interface plus modem or at least two network interfaces.
• SmoothWall refers to the network interfaces by color, Green is LAN, Red is WAN and Orange/Purple are only used if you have more that two interfaces.
• If the probe for network cards fails, your cards are not supported by SmoothWall.

Features
First we will look at the features of the system, I've sorted them by the categories that they appear in the web interface. Some of the details have been omitted because they are very common features that speak for themselves.

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