Endian Firewall is a commercially supported security Linux distribution for turning any box into a full scale security appliance. It features application-level security, a stateful packet inspection firewall, virus, spam, and web traffic filtering as well as a VPN.

How'd this get started?:

Raphael Vallazza: Basically we wanted to provide a security tool that was simple and flexible. We started spending about two months of development to add some features and a more pleasant and intuitive interface to IPCop. Nevertheless we faced various obstacles mainly due to some IPCop architectural drawbacks, like the lack of a package management system and the fact that, being based on Linux from scratch, we had to re-compile the whole distribution for each change we would make. So we decided to start developing EFW, adding the RPM support and yum for updates, creating a build system that could be more complete and efficient. This choice allowed us to step away from IPCop and to proceed in a direction that we believe is more suitable for a professional product that has also an option for valuable commercial support.

What do you think are its best features?

Endian Firewall is very fast and easy to install, with an extremely clear and intuitive Web interface. Its most outstanding feature is allowing the network administrator to manage complex tools with a surprising simplicity.

With just a few clicks you can configure the firewall adding and changing the rules, or you can configure Proxies for Web traffic, E-Mail traffic (POP3 and SMTP) managing content, virus and spam filtering in a breeze. Thanks to the OpenVPN integration you can even implement a VPN (even a bridged one) in few and easy steps.

What is cooking for future releases?

The idea is going on enriching Endian Firewall with many more modules and features. At the moment only the base module is available for download, but all the other modules mentioned on our website are almost finished and will be released in the next weeks. Additional modules and features like Intrusion Prevention System are in planning stage and will be released to the community as soon as the are ready. As a matter of fact Endian is planning to create two parallel versions of Endian Firewall: One for the community and mainly supported by the community in collaboration with Endian and the second one targeted for business use that will be commercially supported by Endian. The community edition will feature faster release cycles and will be more bleeding edge, including all the latest features everyone likes. Updates will be available for everyone by a yum repository but the lifetime will be shorter, about a few months after next release.

The commercial version will be more stable and tested by Endian featuring at least 3 years of lifetime. It will guarantee immediate security updates through Endian Network (an update/package management and system monitoring platform) that will be available for all registered customers. Our hope is to create a big community surrounding Endian Firewall that receives help and support from Endian, but also returning back support to Endian for testing, development and new ideas, in full respect of the open source ideals. Both, the community and the commercial version will be open source.

What do you consider its biggest challenger?

There are some very good projects like Monowall and IPCop itself that offer similar services, but we believe that the synergy between a company (that wants to create a complete and professional product) and the open source community can give our firewall that extra-gear that everything else lacks of. We will do everything we can to support the community and to provide a valuable and 100% open source product, and we are convinced that this will guarantee the success of Endian Firewall, even from a commercial point of view.

Endian Firewall @ OSDir.com