Best PC Based Firewall OS

[php-steven]

I am looking to build a firewall like the one that Pat built with IPCop. Is IPCop the best? Or should I be using SmoothWall or something else?

My primary goal is QoS to make sure that my XBox Live doesnt get degraded if my roommate starts downloading a bunch of stuff.

[computoman]

You talk to ten different people and you will get ten different answers, They also seem to leapfrog each other in capability. Some admins I have talked to like to create there own with iptables. There is another one called vyatta, but it takes a bit of experience to set it up. It is supposed to be good at the cisco commercial routers according to the hype. I am also playing with dd-wrt, but plan to use open-wrt. There are versions that will install on a pc. there are several other popular opensource firewalls that were not in the list. The names escape me at the moment. i would go to a search engine if you have not already done so and scour the web to see what people say about each one. I do know that the shore time i had ipcop up, the internet throughput seemed to dramatically improve. Caveat emptor. Firewalls are like a fish tank, you have to continually feed them updates to keep them working right.

[php-steven]

You talk to ten different people and you will get ten different answers

That is my basic problem. There are 20 different options and everyone thinks a different one is the best. Googling just gives you more of these many answers. :(

I guess instead of asking which is the best I should ask which has the best QoS interface.

[madmax85]

Go with m0n0wall if you have a slower machine and you want more routing performance. m0n0wall will outperform all other free routing software
exept if you go with OpenBSD PF.

if you want alot more features go with pfsense, its based on m0n0wall (m0n0wall is based on FreeBSD). If you have a 100Mbit fiber at home and a old computer like a p2 450 you want to go with m0n0wall.

[tehboris]

When properly configured OpenBSD with PF can't be beaten.