Untangle, the DIY Network Gateway Software

I like building my own home routers. The ones you can pick up from NewEgg are nice, and they do their job admirably. Sometime back, though, I developed a taste for building my own.

Until just recently (we'll get to that), I was running pf on FreeBSD. Love it. Best damn firewall software out there, and if you need something really custom, but don't want to spend a lot of money, that's the way to go.

My old firewall was a little Epia mini-itx (that's small and low-powered), but it handled three network segments just fine, as well as a couple of ancillary tasks. It's been dying for awhile, though. Since it's my house, and that's the only place I get to really play fast-and-loose, I kept it going.

Well, it died, as these things do, last weekend.

I found an old box - another Epia, as it happens - with only two network ports (no wireless segment, for now), and set up Untangle, the "Open Source Network Gateway". There wasn't much to it, put in the CD, answer some questions, do a lot of waiting (the temporary machine is really slow).

It can be set up as a router or a bridge, the latter permitting easy integration into an existing network. There's no need to set up anything on the clients; everything happens transparently. Some of the niftier free modules include an ad blocker, virus blocker (http, smtp, pop3, imap - again, with no configuration), web filters, and so on.

It also provides the typical soho services: DHCP, DNS, port forwarding, etc.

All of that is open source, and free to download. They also have additional modules, on a subscription basis.

So far, it works well for the two segments it is handling. Performance is fine, as long as I don't get crazy with the various modules. There's also a bunch of administration functions I haven't delved into, so I may not be giving it the credit it deserves.

The new hardware should be in this week - it's looking like four network ports, maybe a wifi card, and a nice little Atom processor. It should be faster, in general, but it is going to have a lot more to do. I'll update when I've got a stronger opinion about it.