[ale] Seeking quality embedded SOHO firewall/wireless/vpn device that supports Linux

Brian Pitts brian at polibyte.com
Mon Jul 14 15:14:04 EDT 2008


John Wells wrote:
> For years and years, I've used a combination of a Linksys WAP and open
> source (at times homegrown, Smoothwall, PFsense, and now IPCop)
> firewalls to protect my home LAN. However, given space requirements in
> my office and the attempt to be greener, I'm eliminating most of my
> desktop machines with low-power devices. I first replaced my homegrown
> NAS with a NetGear ReadyNAS device (which, btw, is very nice and runs
> Debian under the covers)...now, I'm looking at the firewall.
> 
> I'd like a device that will provide very, very good protection on the
> broadband and wireless interfaces, while allowing wireless clients to
> connect via VPN so that they can access the rest of my LAN. It's also
> very important that the VPN works well with Linux.
> 
> Can anyone recommend a decent, affordable, and most important, secure, device?

Anything you can find on these lists:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices

With one of the firmwares from this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series#Third-party_firmware_projects

I know that OpenWRT and DD-WRT support OpenVPN:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenVPNHowTo
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/OpenVPN

Or just get a router with USB (like the Asus WL-500G or Linksys
WRTSL54GS) and run Debian:

http://wpkg.org/Running_Debian_on_ASUS_WL-500G_deluxe
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWRT

-Brian


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