If you have ever been involved in setting up a small to mid size network that requires full access to roadwarriors, the ability to detect intrusions, and the need for a firewall, then you will know that it is no easy task. The commercial cost of this alone is enough to consume your entire budget for the network, and quite possibly, eat into the budget you need to buy the computers to run on the network. Try asking for that from a startup that can barely afford the computers! Of course, there are many opensource solutions that can give you all of what you need for free, but with a one man IT shop expect many long nights and truck loads of hot pockets.
There is a quick and very cheap alternative: Untangle. Offering quite possibly the best free network solutions I have seen thus far, Untangle is the one stop shop for any networking requirement. From VPN to intrusion detection, Untangle offers the best of the open source community and rolls it up into a very nice package that is easy to manage. The interface is clean, and each open source offering is presented as a rack mount server.
Below you can see a wide variety of offerings (taken straight from their site) that are available for free, and some commercial offerings that help make the most of your Untangle server.
A list of Open Source offerings are below:
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Commercial offerings below:
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Don’t have a server to spare? Not a problem, virtualization is the key. Not only did the Untangle team spend countless hours creating such a seamless, feature rich product that encompasses some of the best of the open source world (and a few pay for goodies), they went the extra mile and wrote an amazing tutorial on how to get Untangle up and running in a virtual environment here.
Check it out, and let us know what you think!!
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4. November 2008 at 6:11 am
I’ve tried this and now I’m looking at evaluating ebox. Have you tried both of these and if so how do you think they compare?
5. November 2008 at 10:21 pm
To be honest, I hadn’t heard of ebox before so I decided to test it out. Since your comment I’ve had a bit of time to tinker with it. I had a few gripes, but that was for my particular setup.
Gripe number 1) I’m not a huge fan of web interfaces. I know they are the hip thing, but I don’t want the webserver to break when it involves configuring my box. Moreover, I don’t want to be the one breaking the web interface (see Gripe 2). That being said, the interface is very clean and reminds me a lot of a great piece of software called Tomato which we had a post on.
Gripe number 2) The idea of building off of a standard distribution like Debian or Ubuntu is fantastic because it gives access to the latest and greatest software and security fixes. This is a double edged sword because the idea of being able to bring in these bleeding edge updates can also break a box.
As a personal preference, I would lean toward Untangle because they control the whole workings of the system. Meaning, I’m a little more reassured that their regression tests would incorporate all of the features I use most, and limit the potential of breaking my setup if and when I need to update. The downside is loss of customization and configuration (Ubuntu standard installation directories and files, etc).
Gripes aside, eBox has a great configuration backup utility, and some other great features like the ability to have eBox installations “communicate and coordinate with each other without bothering the system administrator.” If you are a Perl programmer and have a need to communicate with other eBox servers (say for reacting to certain security situations) this might be a good option for you.
In the end, it usually boils down to how much control you want over the system. Having a full blown Ubuntu or Debian install with the eBox layer could definitely give you that. If you want an all-in-one system where you sacrifice control for a more stability, and tighter integration, Untangle is certainly an option.
I hope this helps. Thanks for the comment, and for stopping by!