Building a SmoothWall Firewall for a Parochial School

Working with the small, private, parochial school that I have been working with, one of our challenges has been to find a firewall product that was really going to significantly meet our needs. Having extensive Linux experience, using Linux throughout the school and having used SmoothWall in the past we decided to use SmoothWall Express which is now on its sixth and about to go to its seventh patch level on version 2.0.

SmoothWall is a decently full featured and very easy to work with firewall product. With an integrated web proxy, IPSec VPN, web interface, DMZ option, SSH interface, etc. it is a good choice for working with small networks that need an easy to manage firewall component. Because of SmoothWall's low requirements, I was able to build the firewall out of an old HP Vectra desktop with a Pentium 200MMX, 32MB and a 2GB hard drive. Performance will not be stellar and we will not be able to do any real amount of web content caching but at this stage that is relatively unimportant. The most important features of the firewall to us at this stage is the simple management and the firewalling features.