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Over the course of recent years, some people have found the quality of most out-of-the-store firewall appliances either lacking functionality or worse, set at a price that has made them generally out of reach. Because of this issue, I thought it would be beneficial to write an article to better highlight what works and what does not with regard to turning an older PC into a standalone router/firewall appliance.

1. IPCop

At its very core, IPCop is in fact a firewall appliance before all else. And as many of you might suspect, IPCop happens to be a Linux distribution with the sole function of acting as a hardware firewall, thus protecting your network from threats outside and from within. IPCop can be installed via CD, Flash Drive, HTTP/FTP network setups and is fairly straight forward to setup.

Considering the offering of multiple language support and the fact that this little Linux distribution will run on pretty much anything, it is a proven homegrown firewall. Speaking of support, I should also point out that IPCop has a number of very cool add-ons as well. My two favorites are Banish and Copfilter, which is used to filter out malware and viruses in real time.

2. M0n0wall

Regardless of a fantastic effort by IPCop, there is just something to be said about rocking solid BSD solutions. The first that comes to mind is that from m0n0wall. It's small, 12 MBs small! That is the single biggest distinguishing thing to note about m0n0wall. Its size and portability, that is. Designed to be a replacement for those expensive firewall appliances used today, m0n0wall works on embedded machines, in addition to being quite useful on older x86 PCs as well.

Definitely a little more advanced from a usability standpoint than other solutions out there, but do not let this fool you, because m0n0wall is VERY powerful in all of its BSD goodness. This being said, it should be noted that even though m0n0wall is workable on a older PC, it shines best on embedded systems being used by more advanced administrators. Therefore, this is not a really good solution for new Windows converts looking to convert their old PC into something cool.

3. pfSense

From what I have been told, the pfSense project was started by the same people as m0n0wall. Those looking to revamp an older PC might be better off going with pfSense. Plenty of features to speak of. Most notable among them include:

Redundancy -- By creating a fallover group, the network will remain secure even in the event of interfaces that go offline for some reason.

Load Balancing -- Provides both inbound and outbound balancing between WAN connections or multiple servers, depending on which way the traffic happens to be going.

Captive Portal -- Force the user to authenticate or simply find themselves redirected to wherever you wish.

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