[CentOS] Build a Firewall (Can I learn to do this...)

Thu Oct 1 21:22:43 UTC 2009
Stephen Nelson-Smith <stephen at atalanta-systems.com>

On 1 Oct 2009, at 21:56, ML wrote:
> So I am wanting to build a firewall to front end my traffic. Assign
> one of my statics to it and have Comcast statically route my traffic
> to this IP.

You don't need to do this.  You can run all the IPs on the firewall  
box, and route them to machines on a private subnet behind the firewall.

> Can anyone offer advice?

I've had good results doing what you describe - but it's fairly slow  
to get it up and running and the process is very detail oriented, and  
you end up having to do quite a bit of spadework to get a config that  
is as hardened and reliable as a commercial firewall product.  There  
are some reasonable graphical tools that can help you.  The one I've  
used is fwbuilder (http://www.fwbuilder.org/).

I've also looked at Vyatta, and heard good things about pfsense.

S.