installing a firewall

I wanted to install IPFire to protect my laptop. It's a dual boot Ubuntu/W7 that connects to the internet through a wireless router that I believe runs Linux. So I downloaded the IPFire ISO to a CD, and it apparently wants to install itself to a dedicated hard drive as an operating system. It says it will erase whatever is on the installation drive before installing itself. This is completely different from the way that a typical firewall installs in a Windows system. My understanding is that a W7 firewall installs within the Windows OS as an application. I use Online Armor on the W7 side, and that is my understanding of how Online Armor works.

So where should I install IPFire? Do I have to have an external drive or a dedicated partition on my internal hard drive?

I looked at my router, and it apparently has a firewall. However, when I checked it, it was disabled. I enabled it, but there are no rules. What would be some basic rules to use on the router firewall?

 

IPFire is meant to be installed on a spare PC and used as a firewall/router appliance, much like Smoothwall Express as a separeate firewall hardware solution, it's probably possible to install it in a VM and direct all thraffic through it, but that invites misconfiguration even more than using iptables for which Ubuntu has some easy to use front ends.

 

Using a router/firewall OS as a VM provides better isolation from host userland than iptables does. And if you use pfSense, configuring routing and firewall rules is far easier than setting up iptables properly, even with a good GUI frontend.

 

I'll take your word for it, it's so long since I fought much with firewalling Linux it was ipchains when I did. I basically quit worrying beyond removing unused services after I built Smoothwall Express and put the house behind it.

 

LOL - I figured you would find this thread. My issues with pfsense is that my laptop and it don't seem to get along. I really wish it did though! Running linux for a host and then trying a pfsense VM does not seem to work for me. Really frustrating. I would run pfsense in a blink if it ran on my laptop.

 

Does it have a Realtek NIC? If that's the issue, maybe a PCMCIA NIC would work.

If you PM me the laptop's specs, I'll look into it more.