Book Image

Configuring IPCop Firewalls: Closing Borders with Open Source

Book Image

Configuring IPCop Firewalls: Closing Borders with Open Source

Overview of this book

IPCop is a powerful, open source, Linux based firewall distribution for primarily Small Office Or Home (SOHO) networks, although it can be used in larger networks. It provides most of the features that you would expect a modern firewall to have, and what is most important is that it sets this all up for you in a highly automated and simplified way. This book is an easy introduction to this popular application. After introducing and explaining the foundations of firewalling and networking and why they're important, the book moves on to cover using IPCop, from installing it, through configuring it, to more advanced features, such as configuring IPCop to work as an IDS, VPN and using it for bandwidth management. While providing necessary theoretical background, the book takes a practical approach, presenting sample configurations for home users, small businesses, and large businesses. The book contains plenty of illustrative examples.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Configuring IPCop Firewalls
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
7
Virtual Private Networks
11
IPCop Support

Cache Management


Cache size: How much space on disk do we want the cache to take? This is set as a default of 50MB, which is quite sensible for most small networks. If we have a lot of users we may want to increase this to a few 100MB. Going beyond 1 GB on anything but a really large network is rarely necessary. Also, if the number is significantly greater than the available memory on the IPCop machine, then we will have a lot of disk reads/writes, which could slow things down.

Min object size: Sometimes we don't want to cache the really small files as it can be inefficient. Generally, however, it's a good idea to leave this at zero as the repeated HTTP overhead of these files can be a performance hit.

Max object size: Likewise we may not want overly large files to be cached as this will quickly fill up our cache and lead us into the disk read/write problem that we hope to avoid.

The defaults for the previous two options should generally be used unless we have a specific need to change...