As a long-time Smoothwall user, I’ve become disenchanted with the lack of modularity and difficulty required to modify a Smoothwall box to perform tasks that you’d like it to do. Considering I typically use massively overspecced boxes for my firewalls (I hate AT era equipment and decent early ATX gear is hard to come across, plus equipment is so cheap these days anyway) I decided to look around at possibly more hardware demanding security distros.

Clarkconnect, while pleasingly capable of a lot, is a little clumsy and slow on the UI front, and sways a bit too far from the firewall appliance ideal for my liking. On top of that it’s confusing for a newcomer as to where to get it. Like Smoothwall, Clarkconnect is seperated into commercial and community branches. Smoothwall’s site clearly states where to go to get what you’re after, Clarkconnect doesnt make things so clear at this stage.

m0n0wall, based on the uber-OS BSD, is much much better, simplified and designed for a specific purpose. Unfortunately that specific purpose is embedded hardware, which means no squid proxy.

This lead me to pfsense. pfsense is everything you could ever want in a firewall and more. It’s a BSD6 based fork of m0n0wall designed more for recycled-pc and livecd operation. It is a bit more hands on to install than say Smoothwall or Clarkconnect, but then again Smoothwall and Clarkconnect were never really meant to be excessively configurable.

It comes with the usual raft of VPN options, but includes a captive portal, wireless support, multiple interface options (for say multiple DMZ networks, or multiple WAN interfaces) and a whole bunch of features that a firewall should have. CARP makes an entrance, which will make multiple WAN interface handling that much easier.

Basically it’s feature packed, highly configurable and yet still very easy to use with a relatively clean and helpful interface.

Even though it’s still beta, it’s a very mature product and I give it two thumbs up.

Feel free to give it a look: http://www.pfsense.com/

Just got back from a few days out of town – went back to my parents place in Levin to visit them and my cat. Their neighbour came over and was complaining about his new plasma HDTV – it has the new fangdangled HDMI connecter, and he wanted an HDMI to DVI cable.

Turns out that if you try to ask for one of these cables at the noel leemings and harvey normans of this world, you get met with blank stares, or if you get someone who has read a product manual and has a general idea of what HDMI is, they’ll go and try and find something for you. This is what my parents neighbour did. A couple of weeks later he got a call from one such friendly fellow where he was told that such a cable would run you about NZD$500 for 5metres.

Obviously he couldnt believe this – he has a 10m DVI cable that was less than $100!

So I fired up my laptop, I was sitting on his front porch wirelessly connected to my parents internet connection and I googled HDMI to DVI and within the first page of results, I found a simple adaptor by none other than the kings of overpriced placebo effect nonsense, MonsterCable. Even so, it runs in at about NZD$42 plus shipping

Within seconds it was paid for by credit card and on its way.

Noel Leeming – 0. Geek who applies himself for two seconds – 1.