Good hardware firewall

[AV Guy]

We currently have a Sonicwall TZ-170 in front of a SBS 2003 server & 30 workstations. We'll be switching away from the server & Exchange to Google Apps and a NAS and need a good firewall solution that doesn't cause a bandwidth bottleneck. Right now, our speed drops about half going through the Sonicwall. Any suggestions?

[Gracetech]

Connection Speed?
Amount of Users?
Network Speed?
What Switches are you using?

I assume you know this but make sure you setup a DHCP server.

crt

[blonborg]

I support two organizations using solutions from Astaro.

It's not cheap, but they offer excellent solutions. One can buy a hardware solution from them, or install their software on your own hardware, though with the latter, you're licensed by the number of IP addresses you need.

For those that are technically inclined - they offer a free license for home use. You can't use this license for the church. But, it does give you the opportunity to protect your home environment and teach yourself how to use the product.

In the past few days, they announced that they are in the process of being acquired by Sophos.

Bill

[cw4u]

When money wasn't an issue, I've been a big fan of Barracuda Networks products.

One of our routers is about to be replaced and I'm thinking about just putting a free firewall distro on an intel atom computer.

[EricE]

If you don't mind doing minimal tinkering (and I mean minimal) then pfSense on a cast-off machine will probably do just fine. If you don't have an older computer lying around (and it's requirements are pretty minimal!) HP Microservers can be found at or under $300 routinely. I lucked into one for $200 from MacMall a few weeks back - it only came with one network interface port so I scored a dual gigabit Supermicro Intel based NIC off of eBay for $40 - I think it comes in today. Not bad for under $300.

If you want rack mountable, visit this thread where I detail a 1U atom solution that I used for my church: Forcing Intranet Traffic to use specific WAN provider

What are your requirements? I've done web caching/filtering, DNS, DHCP, load balancing, captive portal for wifi, VPN (IPsec and OpenVPN) and more on pfSense - it's quite capable and there is a ton of community support.