🚀 go-pugleaf

It's 26 Jun 98  21:00,
We'll return to prob@usa.net and All's
discussion of Apache WWW server - A good firewall? - how hard to set up?

 pr> Our office has a NT4 server and a network of 25 pc's. We use MS Proxy
 pr> Server to allow internet access but for the moment we are not allowing
 pr> any incoming traffic. I want to connect it to the internet via our
 pr> ISDN connection. An industrial strength firewall is called for. I have
 pr> priced commercial firewalls but they are quite expensive. I wondered
 pr> whether we could run Apache as a firewall on a separate server under
 pr> Linux..

No, Apache is a web server, not a firewall.

There are a few possible solutions, depending on what you want.  I'll
just mention those that need little or no extra expense.

1.  You could keep the existing MS Proxy, patch NT to the latest
hotfixes and put a Linux box in front to act as a packet filter, to add
a first line of defence.  You would need to obtain a block of IP
addresses for the new external subnet, if you don't already have a block
assigned to you.  If you decide to host things like web servers for the
outside world to access, they could be placed between the filter and the
proxy server.

2. Check out the Firewall ToolKit.  It's a set of building blocks to
construct your own firewall, and will work under Linux.  It's not the
easiest thing to setup, and there's a couple of features missing (it
doesn't support Socks 5, for instance).

3. IP masquerading and packet filtering might be worth a shot, though
I'd be more comfortable if these functions were hosted by separate
boxes.  Similar to option 1, except a Linux box with IP masquerading
would replace the MS Proxy.

4. Other freely available proxy servers?

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