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

Summary


In this chapter we have covered caching and traffic shaping with IPCop and how to configure these. This can be useful on even the smallest of networks, as we prioritize service access, allowing users on the network to be guaranteed the best possible service for any critical services in use. The options for doing so in IPCop are quite basic, and we are limited in the control we have. We have seen, however, that it is possible to make an impact on services in order to improve our bandwidth utilization.