Installation and setup
How simple are these firewalls to fire up?
If you need a firewall in a hurry, you could do worse than downloading the ISO or flash image for IPFire. At less than 400MB, you can download quickly via BitTorrent and there are builds available for both x86_64 and AArch64. You can even set up an instance in Amazon Cloud. A basic install took less than three minutes on our virtual machine.
Alpine Linux also offers cloud instances in a number of locations. The Standard ISO weighs in at just 160MB but the Extended version at 814MB is better for firewall usage, as it’s designed specifically for servers and routers. It can also run directly in RAM. Whichever you choose, there’s no helpful wizard. You need to log in as root via the CLI and run the script setupalpine on first boot to enter your preference.
VyOS’s rolling release is around 450MB and can be run in live mode for a quick start. You can also log in using the username and password vyos , then type install image to copy the live instance to your hard disk. The text wizard is very intuitive and you’ll be satisfied with most of the default options, such as the root partition size. Setup takes three minutes.
The Community edition of Endian Firewall is around 375MB and boots to a very simple-to-use setup wizard, which automatically asks you to set a language and begins partitioning your disks. We were impressed to see that setup offers the option to enable a console over a laptop serial port, which can make monitoring and configuring the firewall much easier postinstall. It asks for the IP address of the “green interface” and then runs “post-install procedures”. This was by far the slowest to set up of all the firewalls we tested, taking eight minutes. The installer also didn’t exit gracefully, forcing us to power off the machine ourselves.
ClearOS has the weightiest install media at 1.7GB but makes up for this with a graphical install wizard. Unlike Endian, you have to manually select your install disk, so there’s less risk of overwriting the wrong one. Once the necessary packages are copied over, you only need to set a root password to complete installation. Overall install time was about four minutes.