Gateway antivirus/firewall

[lowfwyr]

I'm interested in setting up a gateway server that will act as a firewall as well as scan incoming/outgoing HTTP/FTP traffic for viruses. I've looked at a few comercial solutions, however, they seem to be very expensive to use for securing a home network. Just like everybody else I'd prefer that the solution be cheap and headache free but I know that reality doesn't always work the way we want. Anywho, does anybody know of any piece of software that would allow scanning of HTTP/FTP for viruses?

[chilifrei64]

Not for Windows that comes along with the tag "cheap and headache free"

Linux has a few different options..I walked into a client about 2 months ago and ran into this http://www.postfix.org/start.html with an antivirus add on. It is based on the linux shell. Not sure how you feel about that. It uses the ClamAV as its virus scanner.

Other than that you can get a SonicWall TZ150 for about 350 then get the AV upgrade package for just shy of 200...

This is meant for SOHO use. those prices will get you about 5 connected clients.. you could always put a regular linksys/netgear router behind that to get more clients though... That is about as cheap as I have seen it though

[lowfwyr]

One of the things I ran into while hunting for possible solutions is http://www.efw.it/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. Apparently it's based on IPCop and uses ClamAV to scan HTTP and FTP traffic. It also uses Spam Assassin to scan SMTP traffic. So far this looks like the most attractive option but I'm always open to new and interesting ideas.

Maybe it would help if I clarified my original question. I currently have 6 computers on a gigabit network which is being fed it's internet connection from a Linksys BEFSX41 router. I'm working on uncluttering the appartment as I have plans for a few more machines and I'm going to rackmount the whole lot of them, with the exception of 2 desktop computers. I have some older computers (i.e. AthlonXP 2000+) that I could fairly easily retask as a firewall appliance of some kind. I've found quite a few solutions (linux and otherwise) that are very good firewalls but not many that will scan the traffic for viruses. So far only the one I've mentioned here has done it in a package that appears fairly easy to work with. The eventual end of the plan is to be able to put the hardware into a 1U rack and mount it out of the way with everything else and get rid of my current router (which is not designed for a rack).

I appreciate the suggestion and I'll check it out. At this point I'm just creating a list of options before I decide exactly what I'm going to do. Whenever I figure out what I'm going to use and have it set up, I'll post my experience here. I'm kind of surprised that nobody has asked about this kind of solution before on this forum.

[lowfwyr]

After doing quite a bit of comparing different options I elected to go with SmoothWall. This combined with ClamAV and DansGuardian seem to give me good performance, both from a security and a network throughput standpoint. I have removed the default content filtering settings from DansGuardian and have added the domains of many known spyware sources and banner ads so they never get to the systems behind the firewall. I have also enabled webcaching so things are quite speedy. I'm only running it on a Pentium 3 1ghz machine with 512MB of RAM (the content filtering stuff takes up alot of memory when I have many connections or alot of downloading going on at the same time). It may just be my perception, but this seems faster than my Linksys router ever was. No problems whatsoever. To anybody looking for a similar solution I'd deffinetly recomend SmoothWall. Also, keep in mind that most of the people on their forums are only running it on a 300mhz CPU with less than 256MB of RAM so you don't have to have a terribly powerful system, if you're only gonna have a couple of computers using it, though at least 128MB of RAM is recomended.

[chilifrei64]

I am running SmoothWall on a client at a router with SPI between 2 clients that share a building and an internet connection. We are running it on an old dell 750mhz with 128 mb ram. That is the beauty of specialty linux machines is it runs on minimal hardware and performs adaquetly. I have not gone farther with smoothwall than just the basic features.. (not necessary for my usage) but glad to hear that it works well. Thank you for the input.