Sunday, January 14, 2007

Monowall VS Pfsense

I did a little research on Monowall vs Pfsense features. I really need to choose between the two, because since Monowall only needs 64 MB of memory and Pfsense 128MB, it will be the deciding factor in my purchase. The cheaper board from PCengine tend to have less memory, while the pricier and more potent boards from Soekris Engineering can have up to 256MB of memory, and thus be more future, and feature ready.

Since Pfsense is based on Monowall, it has the same features, namely:
  • Everything a Linksys WRT54G can do...
  • IPsec VPN tunnels
  • wireless support (WEP, WPA in the near future)
  • SNMP agent
  • SVG-based traffic grapher
  • serial console interface
  • 802.1Q VLAN support (useful for a separate wireless network)
  • and more features, that are less usefull for me...
Pfsense has all that, plus:
  • SSH support
  • CARP!
  • Traffic shapping
  • pf (openbsd's packet filter)
  • packages! (Even if they are not supported on embedded platform for now)
The packages (including doorman, snort, nmap, squid, etc...) are the most attracting features of Pfsense, but are disabled on the embedded edition...

Going to do a cost-analyst for the hardware solutions and post my results later...

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