Exploring SmoothWall Firewall: Open Source And Commercial Options

With more than one million users, U.K.-based SmoothWall’s Firewall may just be the most popular software firewall that has yet to become a household name. Test Center engineers recently took at look at products from SmoothWall to see what all the buzz is about and to see exactly why one million users have chosen the product.

The first thing to understand about SmoothWall’s Firewall is that there are two versions available: an open-source version that is free to anyone and a commercial version, named SmoothWall Advanced Firewall, that offers significant feature enhancements over the open-source version. The Advanced Firewall product supports add-on security technologies such as bandwidth management, antivirus and content filtering.

At first glance, the SmoothWall’s suite of commercial products doesn’t seem at all unique when compared to integrated firewalls from competitors. But upon closer evaluation, solution providers will discover that SmoothWall’s products are an ideal path to build custom security appliances.

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