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Best router distro for VM

Featured Replies

  • Author

i love untangle the web interface is awesome but i dont want to pay 200.00 per year for multi-wan and other misc. packages. If the prices for home user packages were more reasonable i would go for that!

 

plus i didnt think untangled worked as a wifi access point

What about ipfire or sophos?

I have loaded both in virtbox and both looks very capable. .

 

Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk

 

 

Pfsense is the one I've heard the most about, and used it for a few months before I broke the config and never bothered to fix it.

 

Pfsense was great, mainly for the graphs. :)

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

 

Pfsense or monowall (there are lots of others but those two are the easiest to get going imho)

 

Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk 2

 

 

Just read your list and uses. Pfsense is what you want. I've been running it in vmware for 4+ years.

 

Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk 2

 

 

Still use Smoothwall because I haven't touched it in years. It used to have a terrific community but it slowed up a lot a few years back. I'd probably go with pfsense these days (although never ran any in a VM)

Just checked one of my Pfsense and its been up for 376 days :-)

 

Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk 2

 

 

Pfsense or monowall (there are lots of others but those two are the easiest to get going imho)

 

Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk 2

 

i believe pfsense is a fork of monowall or vice versa.  I also believe monowall just released an update, so while I never used monowall, I assume, you cant go wrong with either.

 

 

Still use Smoothwall because I haven't touched it in years. It used to have a terrific community but it slowed up a lot a few years back. I'd probably go with pfsense these days (although never ran any in a VM)

 

I was a smoothwall guy till I had to rebuild every time there was an update and it broke the mods.  hoping the new versions brings new life

  • Author

I feel like Goldilocks

 

untangled = too expensive

pfsense = too limited out of the box

zeroshell = a  pain to set up

sophos = too much

dd-wrt = too limited (multiwan)

 

( for me ) this is not meant to start a flame war, they are all great distros im just being picky lol. I basically want untangled but without the  200.00 per year sub for antivirus and multiwan. Im sure each one could do what i need/want, but i dont want to speed 4 hours hacking it up to make it work.

Don't forget untangle

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

From my experience, untangle uses crazy resources compared to pfsense which is where my vote it. Not to mention it is not completely free if I recall when you want certain plugins.  ipfire is OK, but never got into it too much beyond an install.  Last I recall the plugins lacked.

 

clear OS is another I have messed with,  they have a vm appliance pre made too for esx, so not sure of the conversion to xen, but maybe.  It was very involved, super complex, so it could be good.  pfsense has a smaller learning curve in my opinion

 

 

I feel like Goldilocks

 

untangled = too expensive

pfsense = too limited out of the box

zeroshell = a  pain to set up

sophos = too much

dd-wrt = too limited (multiwan)

 

( for me ) this is not meant to start a flame war, they are all great distros im just being picky lol. I basically want untangled but without the  200.00 per year sub for antivirus and multiwan. Im sure each one could do what i need/want, but i dont want to speed 4 hours hacking it up to make it work.

 

pfsense in my opinion is not limited at all out of the box.  add-ons make it better, but overall it is ready to go.

I'm running pfSense VM on my ESXi box and it has never failed me. It HAS to work as I'm away from home quite often and my gf is not very tolerant when it comes to my "hobby" not working (the same box is also serving Live-TV and media). :P

  • Author

I have narrowed it down to pFsense or untangled not sure which one, probably pfsense. Time to dig into addons, multiwan and snort/IDS.

I have narrowed it down to pFsense or untangled not sure which one, probably pfsense. Time to dig into addons, multiwan and snort/IDS.

 

On my ESXi 5.5, I use both pfsense and unTangle lite/free in Bridge mode. Both has ESXi VM appliances, so it was pretty simple to setup. pfSense handles Firewall/DHCP/DNS/snort&IDS and unTangle does the UTM stuff. Lots of googling helped since I'm not a network specialist.

I use ClearOS on a small Atom appliance and have for years. I need to upgrade to the newest code but have enjoyed their free version for awhile. I wild like some better reporting and whatnot though for sure. I'd love to find something that logged DNS queries too! Darkstat on unRAID has been handy too.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

  • 2 weeks later...

Well, I keep seeing this type of discussion cropping up and I think to myself that I must be missing something interesting here. Sooooo, seeing that pfsense normally wins out, off I go, googling it to try and find out what this mythical beast is all aboot.

 

I start reading the overview and features and I think to myself....I don't get it. I then try to relate to it of what I already know and come up with the same answer...surely my router does all this already...besides the graphing and logging etc, but then I'm not a network administrator for a company, so why would I want to use this at home. I'm sure my cat isn't trying to hack my porn collection!

 

So please, I ask of you, put me out of my ignorance & misery and explain to me the point of this is. In what scenario are you lot using this? I so desperately want to install and try it out, but fear it's going to a) interfere with any normal router I may have and b) take a while to configure for me to simply delete it.

 

Cheers!

A lost soul :D

The beauty of virtualization...you can create as many VMs as you like.  Wanna try pfsense....fire up that VM.  Wanna try ClearOS...shutdown pfSense and fire up the ClearOS one.

 

My advice is to try each one for 2 weeks.  That is what I did (multiple times).  In the end I always come back to pfSense.

 

John

  • 2 weeks later...

Hi mates,

 

And what about vyatta ( http://vyatta.org/ )? I've several vm running vyatta to simulate a complex enterprise architecture in our lab.

  • 2 weeks later...

Well, I keep seeing this type of discussion cropping up and I think to myself that I must be missing something interesting here. Sooooo, seeing that pfsense normally wins out, off I go, googling it to try and find out what this mythical beast is all aboot.

 

I start reading the overview and features and I think to myself....I don't get it. I then try to relate to it of what I already know and come up with the same answer...surely my router does all this already...besides the graphing and logging etc, but then I'm not a network administrator for a company, so why would I want to use this at home. I'm sure my cat isn't trying to hack my porn collection!

 

So please, I ask of you, put me out of my ignorance & misery and explain to me the point of this is. In what scenario are you lot using this? I so desperately want to install and try it out, but fear it's going to a) interfere with any normal router I may have and b) take a while to configure for me to simply delete it.

 

Cheers!

A lost soul :D

 

Here is a simple scenario: using a VPN service for all and/or some of your traffic.  Most off-the-shelf routers would dramatically slow down (e.g. 30Mbps turns into 6) if you wanted your VPN service running on your router.

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