Firewall/Proxy/Load Balancer

IITYWYBMAD

Folks,

I need some recommendations here. I've started work on a new site which is fully windows based. They have 3 DSL lines, No firewall and no proxy server. I need a piece of software which will allow me to fully exploit the 3 DSL lines (bridge or load balance all 3) for download and possibly upload, I need a strong, but easy to use Firewall, and a Proxy server of some sort, an all in one solution would be great. I have a budget of €3K. What would you recommend?

Capt'n Midnight

I take it this is for an office or similar
with 3 DSL lines that means a few people.



Squid is a fairly standard caching proxy. used to use SquidNT, but not too sure of the status of windows ports these days, all you do is change two lines in the default config and you are good to go.


Windows ain't great at load balancing, you can add multiple gateways in the TCP/IP settings, but I've yet to see it work. Far easier to set this stuff up on a linux / BSD box, if you are lazy you can get one off the shelf.

Say what you want about BSD, but when it comes to low budget firewalls BSD is king. Many commercial standalone firewalls are BSD based, even Microsoft based their Windows TCPIP stack on BSD.


load balancing is tricky because you have to make sure a session by a client doesn't switch to a different route, another problem is when sites pass to other sites, so might be best to map clients to routes rather than do it by sites