Best Defence for Littlest Money?

[sirrell]

I use a Billion 711CE which has a limited firewall, been breached.
I use Zone Alarms Pro with default High security get hacked on Vista.
I then use both Zone Alarms Pro going through a 386 running IPCOP, they hacked IPCOP but their scripts failed (I think)
(but they got in if they installed startup scripts)
Basically i want to reinstall the IPCOP machine with anything better?

I haven't tried Smoothwall Lately or Trustix Enterprise ever, are they any better?

Who ever is hacking my IP is good at it that is for certain.
I now disconnect my modem when ever i'm not using the PC.
But that's annoying.
Also considering ditching MS for LINUX on my workstations, Suse or RH?

Please Advise.

Computer Tech Guy

 

[JustAGuy51]

If you ware willing to put up some work, install OpenBSD based firewall, using packet filter called pf. I say, the best combination, hands down. Put this box as a firewall in front of your network. If you have DSL, set up PPPoE interface in OpenBSD. If you have cable, set up DHCP Client. Both are one liner configurations. Let me know if you need some help on writing firewall rules.

For Linux, I like Slackware for being conservative, stable and A LOT less programs installed by default. But Slackware is not useful for job hunting; try CentOS (free version of Red Hat Enterprise) and you can kill 2 birds with one shot.

 

[mentalhemroids]

All you need is a pentium II box with 128 mb ram and you can install pfSense. www.pfsense.org runs on the FreeBSD platform and uses a web interface to remotely configure all your options.

It is the best free firewall setup on the web.