posted on Monday, January 24, 2005 6:46 PM
by
suniljagadish
Security - the need of the hour
I downloaded FreeSCO (Free ciSCO) a soft-router with firewall capabilities. I was on the lookout for a firewall, prefereably something which could be configured on a diskless PC. I preferred a diskless PC because of two reasons - easy and hassel free harware setup & not so easy for hackers to sneak in. Mr.Jayakrishna had suggested the use of FreeSCO quite sometime back. Now that I am getting a broadband internet connection, I definitely require something more than just a Zone Alaram. One can easily setup a custom firewall with two layers of firewalls. A FreeSCO box can be in the outer layer with an NT machine in the inner circle.
FreeSCO is an open source program that can run on a 1.44MB floppy disk and also it comes with lots of cool features and customizations that can be done. Being a command line utility it is not very user-firendly. All you need to do is to download FreeSCO and make a Floppy disk copy of the FreeSCO setup files. It is based on a 2.0.39 Linux kernel. And a sad part of it is that you need to tinker around with its code if you need to get internal modem support for it. I havent ventured too much into that direction but Skp was telling that there is a patch available for it. Yeah when I say modem, I reffered to a dial-up modem. It does support Leased line, Cable, DSL connectivity too. Support for PPPoE is also built into it. Another cool feature is that it has a web control pannel using which you can login from anywhere and control your firewall/router remotely. It can be configured as webserver to serve simple HTML content. Simple and cool implmentation of Linux.
Yeah obviously, it cannot be compared to a CISCO PIX or Checkpoint, which are real good enterprise ready and highly reliable products. Probably this is one drawback I see when you speak of many open source projects. They are not complete in the sense that not all features are built into it. Bug-fixes are a slow process. So if you wanna get a simple home-made low cost firewall, just go in for FreeSCO.