A Quick Look at Untangle

I’ve been running the same “SOHO” firewall at home since 2001. My trusty Netgear FVS318. A pretty solid unit and hasn’t ever let me down, but old enough not to be upgradeable. This week I decided to have a look around see what else is out there to use.

See, while the FVS318 has certainly been solid for me, I’d like something with some more features aimed at home users – and yet still affordable. I thought perhaps something PC-based would be the way to go. That way I could try out a few options and not have a large investment in hardware. They also tend to be open source based or derived which can help with cost.

Originally I was going to start with the free version of Astaro as that’s one I had heard of. When I asked on Twitter if anyone had used it, Mortisult replied back suggesting I look at untangle instead. So, I took his advice and started with that one.

I borrowed an older 2.4 Celeron with 1.25GB from the office and tossed in an old’ish Netgear card that I had laying around. That way it has two Ethernet ports: One for WAN and one for LAN.

Next I headed over to the Untangle site to grab the ISO for the free version. Burned the ISO to CD, popped it into the machine and fired it up.

The installation is dead simple and on first boot I was walked through a little wizard to get things configured. I connected it to my cable modem (WAN) and a little switch (LAN) with all the other machines on my network and it was all working as soon as I finished the wizard.

Very simple to work with and very easy to configure. The  primary interface is via “the rack.” You can see from the image below that I’ve added most of the free bells & whistles to mine.

See all that fun stuff? Spyware Blocker, Web Filter, Virus Blocker, Intrusion Prevention, Protocol Control (currently off as I really have no need for it), Firewall, Ad Blocker, Attack Blocker and reporting modules all loaded up and all free.

If you go the Paid-Apps route you get commercial versions of some of that, along with other nice stuff like an AD Connector, Policy Manager and some interesting Remote PC stuff.

Each individual item in the rack can be managed via its “settings” button and that’s also where you go to check individual logs. Each item also has a power button to the right which can make for some very easy trouble-shooting.

The only thing I haven’t added and tested yet is the OpenVPN rack item. That’ll happen soon though as it is another one of the reasons I’m exploring other firewalls.

My benchmark speed tests haven’t changed. In fact, they may have increased a very small amount (using speedtest.net).

However, I will note that the PC running untangle reported a jump to 52% CPU while I was running the test

Long story short, for a minimal investment in an older PC with dual network cards you can have yourself a very full featured little home firewall and security system. So far I’m very impressed.

I may have to scare up my own PC for this to give this loaner back to work… but finding older PCs is never really a challenge. Might be an interesting use for one of the laptops I have floating around…

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