Everyone, How do we stack up against Smoothwall? It seems to consistently get more press than we do.
Review: Smoothwall Express 2.0 Final http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5897
I'm in the process of downloading the relevant iso's now, and I;ll take a look a thtem later. To judge just from the review you referenced and the Smoothwall Website, I'd guess that people see Smoothwall as having these advantages:
1. A nice, Web-based administration interface. Apparently one that uses SSL.
2. Ease of setup, particularly with respect to hardware issues like NIC detection. The review doesn't actually mention this part of the setup, from which I infer that it happens invisibly.
3. Lack of choice. (Yes, I do think many people, beginners especially, see this as a benefit.) There is really only one install system -- the 2.0 CD image -- to select. It is geared to the sort of spare PC -- one with a CD drive, a modest-sized hard disk, and a floppy drive, NICs that can be autodetected -- that many people will have laying around (except for adding the second NIC). Notice that the reviewer talked about running Smoothwall 1.0 on "an old Pentium II 400mhz machine" ... something well above the LEAF hardware minimum.
(This lack of choice can leave one high and dry, though. Consider that the reviewer talks about abandoning his Smoothwall 1.0 system when he moved and "I couldnt get it to pick up an ip address from my new broadband provider (ADSL based) so I gave up and re-installed the dlink hardware firewall" ... which, presumably, could get an address assignment. Who knows what went wrong here and if LEAF could have handled it?)
4. Professional looking Website. This is a side effect of Smoothwall being a free product made available ... I assume for business-promotion reasons ... by a vendor of "commercial supported security products, designed for use in small to medium sized businesses, education and corporate offices".
5. Possibly, a more systematic approach to updates. At least the review seems to imply that.
Put all of this together and I suspect that Smoothwall will look a lot like a Linux version of the sort of SOHO router/firewall made by Linksys, Netgear, etc. Very useful for a small set of "standard" uses, but hard to adapt to the kinds of unusual, custom requirements that I regularly see discussed on leaf-user.
LEAF cannot compete with a distro like this on its own terms. Nor do I think we should try to. Fond as I am of the naive, beginner-level home user, today's LEAF variants no longer really are optimized for that sort of application. Our strength is in flexibility, and to a degree in bottom fishing ... the simplest LEAF systems can still run on much more minimal hardware than Smoothwall can, I believe. LEAF continues to push the edge on minimalist configuration options, with its use of uClibc and other libraries and apps that have a more "embedded focus" than I suspect Smoothwall has.
These are just preliminary thoughts, though. I have some free time later this week, and a spare system to do a test install on, so I'll take a look at Smoothwall in test-bench operation and see what it looks like.
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