gShiled wins by far

Did i say, a couple of days ago, that i put out the gShield Linux-based iptables firewall and replaced it with some other stuff from some other folks?

I regret.

I had so much trouble with access to the web that i had to put gShield back online again.

As it turned out, the m0n0wall software could not handle the traffic consistently. Am talking about an ISP network loaded, to maximum available bandwidth capacity, from morning up to around mid-night every day for 365 days through.

m0n0wall was good on features but bad on persistence. At most, it would run for about 50 minutes before collapsing and needing a reboot.

Determined, i went for smoothwall. Got its iso image onto a CD-W and prepared it to replace the gShield firewall slot at the network backbone. Now, this one has all the features you need in a Linux-based firewall: a cool GUI, ssh remote access, https access, DHCP, DHCP address reservation, integrated web-cache, and a horde of others.

But again, it also could not handle the heat. Worked well for the first 2 hours, then it started crawling to a halt every after 30 or so minutes, consuming all the memory and doing practically nothing. I disabled the resource-guzzling web-cache. Problem persisted.

I was using the same machine so that i compare the firewalls on the same platform. Of course another firewall machine was readily available for stand-by switch-over to keep the network running. By late afternoon, i decided to put back my dear work-horse - gShield.

gShield thoroughly beats them. It has worked for over a year now - glitch-free.