Re: small LAN ADSL router advice sought

Dean Hamstead <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.org.user-groups.slug.chat
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I advise you to not use your router as a mail server.

Proxy functionality is a great idea. Most firewall distributions support 
it. And you can be sneaky and do it transparently. My experience has 
shown that in a small office (100 users) approx 60% of throughput is 
served from the cache. Which is very obviously a real world saving in 
not only internet costs, but potentially staff time and staff morale. A 
transparent proxy also allows you to ban urls rather than just ip 
ranges. Banning facebook, myspace, youtube, hotmail, twitter, ebay, 
commsec, asx etc are all great ways to remove time wasters or to only 
allow them in break hours. You can also ban *.exe, *.rar, *.zip files or 
whatever is needed to keep the internet costs down and staff time 
wastage to a minimum.

Feel free to flame me if you disagree with blocking social networks etc 
in work places. IMO they are most likely not going to result in 
increased company revenues or decreased government spending.

In any case

try out one or more of the following, i use pfsense over ipcop. but have 
had good success in both. ipcop has a nice feature to cache windows 
updates indefinitely so they are downloaded only once (which is 
transparent, as opposed to a WSUS server)

http://pfsense.org
http://www.ipcop.org

this looks good but i havent used it

http://coyotelinux.com/
http://www.untangle.com
http://www.endian.com

Dean

Voytek Eymont wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 2:39 pm, Dean Hamstead wrote:
>> Do you have a list or requirements?
>>
>>
>> Do you want something rolled up nicely (like smoothwall, pfsense etc?)
>> or something really small but feature packed (like dd-wrt?)
> 
> Dean,
> thanks
> 
> I'm contemplating to offer to connect these systems, at the moment, they
> are largely stand alones, it's a pretty basic requirements on the LAN
> side: email and www access, I'm looking at something robust and reliable
> that will allow me to control the setup, if and when requirement grow
> 
> I envisage having a local mail server and proxy server, what else should I
> anticipate?
> 
> 

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