There are a variety of different levels of firewall available. At one end of the spectrum, there are enterprise systems such as Check Point and ISA, which perform all kinds of powerful functions and can control the traffic for networks of vastly varying sizes and topologies. At the other end of the spectrum, we have personal firewalls running on host machines such as Agnitum, ZoneAlarm, and the built-in firewall in Windows XP Service Pack 2, which protect a single machine. There are also many home routers that provide basic firewall functionality. This leaves us with the question as to which of these roles IPCop is appropriate for, and whether it suits our needs.

IPCop is best suited, as we discussed earlier, to the SOHO network. If our network is relatively small with a single Internet connection, such as a home network or small business, or we have a couple of sites with separate internet connections that require linking together in a medium-sized business then we can...