Good firewall

neo468

I am at the beginning stages of putting together my home lab, and thought the best place to start is from the outward in. What would be a good firewall to get? I'm going to be studying for my CCNA in the spring.

nice343

I don't have a dedicated firewall on my home router but once you get comfortable with with access-list, you can filter any traffic that you want

KGhaleon

I assume you mean a hardware firewall, I'm curious as well.

A good software firewall I use is called Comodo. There's also Kerio and ZoneAlarm, along with a bunch of others. Free software, mainly.

KG

Mishra

I use endian firewall at my house. google it

Its Linux but works well and is user friendly.

sprkymrk

If you plan on continuing down the Cisco route, and you mean a real firewall and not just an ACL on a standard router, you should get one of Cisco's SOHO appliances like an ASA 5505 10 user bundle or a PIX 501, these will still set you back $500 though.

However, for the CCNA exam you don't really need such equipment. A router with some good ACL's will get you the practice you need, but they will be less secure than most of your sub $100 broadband routers with built-in stateful firewalls.

ally_uk

I also keep the cost down by using Linux I use Debian and setup my own firewalls using IPTABLES

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/263

If you want to keep the cost down and learn some new skills which could benefit a company in the future then this is the way to go.

Also it's pretty bullet proof I haven't had any problems with using this.

As for the whole Cisco route part of me agrees that acquiring Cisco skills is a good goal to achieve but with Open Source technologies gradually gaining more commercial strength and momentum Alot of the Cisco technologies can easily be replaced with Open Source Variants for a cheaper expenditure.

For example setting up a Asterisk system's to handle telephony is a good example of ways of keeping the costs down

RTmarc

If you are looking for a dedicated appliance, I use a FortiGate 60A. I am a huge FortiGate fanboy too.

http://www.fortinet.com