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

Features of IPCop


Throughout this book we will be discussing version 1.4.10 of IPCop, which is the latest release at time of writing. As IPCop is continually being developed new features will be added and some of these features may change.

Web Interface

A lot of firewalls come with a cluttered, complex user front end that requires significant amount of training and experience to become familiar with. The ISA server interface, for instance, is famously unintuitive and often interfaces aren't designed in order to make common tasks simple and easy to accomplish.

Frequently, proprietary firewalls such as ISA server and BorderWare will rename common functions such as port forwarding and refer to them as something entirely different, not making life any easier even for an administrator with experience of firewalls, but no knowledge of the particular user interface in question. As an easy example of this, BorderWare refers to port forwarding as an internal proxy, ISA as publishing, and DrayTek...