The Leeds, UK-based company offers its FW technology in two versions, both of them software-only: the more basic Corporate Firewall for up to 250 users, and the more comprehensive Advanced Firewall for larger numbers. The Advanced Firewall, which includes default features such as VPN that are sold as separate modules for Corporate, can also be deployed in two modes: gateway and internal.
SmoothWall is at version 4.0 of its product portfolio and plans to add AV the fourth quarter of this year. We’ll offer both built-in AV, probably the open source, Linux-based ClamAV, as well as an interface to all the major [commercial] AV engines through ICAP, the standard for communications between processors in the security world, said SmoothWall’s commercial director George Lungley.
Intrusion detection is already a feature of SmoothWall’s offering and the plan is to add intrusion-prevention capability by release 5.0, which should be in the second quarter of 2006 according to the current roadmap.
The privately held company’s products already offer authentication to Microsoft’s Active Directory, with Novell’s eDirectory next on its list, according to Lungley. On the VPN side, again SmoothWall offers options. We can do IPsec for site-to-site and, for multi-site, we offer Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, he said.
L2TP, an IETF standard protocol that merges the best of Cisco’s Layer 2 Forwarding and Microsoft’s Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol, not only offers the advantage of enabling multi-point tunneling but also ships as part of both Windows XP and 2000 and is relatively trivial to implement compared to IPsec, Lungley said. He said that while SSL, which is usually a clientless VPN technology, has its merits as an alternative to IPsec, L2TP is something people should also consider.
Advanced Firewall costs GBP 950 ($1,650) for the first 250 users and four network interfaces, with further users and interfaces being added in license chunks.
