A few weeks ago, our eppliance gauntlet firewall crashed and we had to get a new hard disk with the OS and firewall shipped out from support. In the meantime, I tried to set up a temporary linux firewall using smoothwall. This gave us access to the web but no email. I tried playing around with a linux distro but the new disk had arrived and my time was better spend configuring the new version of gauntlet but left me wondering how I could use linux to replace our gauntlet firewall.
We do not have any internet facing services, we just allow users access to smtp/http/ssl/ftp. Our ISP advertises the outside IP address of the firewall as the MX record for the domain and the firewall forwards email to our internal mail hub running Qmail Smoothwalls config did not allow for our particular email setup and it looked like it was not designed for that kind of setup anyway. I tried setting up/securing mandrake with squid and used mandrakes firewall script generator to generate the rules for iptables. I tried to configure sendmail to forward mail to our qmail server but as I do not know know sendmail and was running out of time, I never got very far. I'm sure I could have tweaked the iptables rules to get what I wanted but the real problem was getting sendmail to relay email to our internal hub. So the question is, was I on the correct track? Should I have tried to tweak smoothwall or is there another firewall app out there that would have met our requirements. -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
