What is the toughest firewall?
 

I am looking for a very tough firewall to secure a highly sensitive network that I am building.  I need something that will even stop fragmented packets.  Does anyone here know of and good ones?

Thanks

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

I use ZoneAlarm at home and it works very well.  I have had very good luck with it.  Although, I do not know exactly how tough it really is.  I do know that the Cisco firewall OS on their router is very very strong.  You cannot even pass fragmented packets through it.

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

Checkpoint Firewall-1 is by far the best firewall product out there. But if you are looking for a free firewall...IPF
is your best bet. IPF is for UNIX....

Is this on a windows box?

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

If it's a big network with lots of money a checkpoint firewall is in order - if it's on a small scale route it through a secure slack box running ipchains.

Your not going to stop a big DoS attack no matter what you buy - even with millions of dollars in equipment.

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

yeah this is a windows machine.

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

I've found the best firewall is to just shut it off  ;D

Hey someone has to bring some light to the conversation.

Just wanted to agree with Dave have a good'n all!

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

I have used, Checkpoint FW1, Axent Raptor, Alta Vista, Gauntlet, Cisco Pix, Watchguard FireboxII, Watchguard SoHo, Sonicwall Pro, and Sonicwall Soho. I ve ran speed tests as well as integrety tests against them all and while many score very close to the same the best overall <pricepoint included> IMHO is the Watchguard Firebox II, if its a smaller network <under say 20 machines> go for the soho product.

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

I am currently using an OLD compaq deskpro which is like 90 Mhz with 16 megs ram.  I threw in a 500 mb harddrive, and 2 ethernet cards.  I installed Debian and got ipchains and ssh...  set your inside ehternet card for 10.0.0.1 or whatever network you prefer and there you have it!

Has not failed me yet! ;)

-RJ

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

security policy dictates you blackhole all sensative information ie take it completely offline. At least build yourself a seperate firewall box from your computer and run intrusion detection software on both the firewall box and the client machine. Many useful linux firewalls are available ranging from small hard drive installs like the netbsd router project and smoothwall to micro firewalls like linuxrouterproject and freesco that operate off a single floppy. You do your computer and your information a disservice to run windows software firewalls of any kind.

Re: What is the toughest firewall?
 

Black Ice Defender is supposed to be really good.  It's not all that expensive, if you want to pay for your firewall.  I'd say that you'd probably want to go with a hardware firewall, if for no other purpose than to free up system resources.