Zeroshell: an Italian Router - Firewall - Bridge

Zeroshell is an Italian free Linux distribution that can be installed on a standard PC and that provides the main network services a LAN normally requires (routers, bridges, Firewall, VPN, HTTP proxy, captive portal, etc..)

http://www.zeroshell.net/

It is available in Live CD or Compact Flash image and you can configure and administer via a web browser.
Anyone with a little familiarity with such hardware can reuse an old PC and turn it into the router (all at no cost!).
Among the many features provided by this tool I found very interesting:
1) the Net Balancer that can operate in two modes a) "Load Balancing and Failover" where the requests for access to the Internet are balanced automatically and in proportion to the weight of each gateway and, in the event of failure of one gateway, this is excluded from the Automatic
balance  b) "Failover" only one link is active at a time (the one with highest weight among those who are not in the state of Fault). The others are in the state of Spare, ready to attend in case of interruption of the active link.
2) the Virtual Private Network (LAN-to-LAN),  the ability to create links encrypted (permanent and automatic) over networks points that are geographically dispersed (using Internet).



PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: 

I use a Zeroshell with two ADSL balancedconnections with different ISPs and different speeds.
On two other Zeroshell I use  a VPN LAN-to-LAN to easily connect a company that has two offices located in different cities using their ADSL connection.


Here are some of the most important features: 

- Balancing and Failover of multiple connections to the Internet; 

- UMTS / HSDPA 3G modem; 

- RADIUS Server 

- Captive Portal 

- Management of QoS (Quality of Service) 

- HTTP Proxy with ClamAV open source antivirus 

- Support for the functionality of the Wireless Access Point Multi SSID using WiFi network cards based on Atheros chipsets. 

- VPN LAN-to-host protocol L2TP/IPsec 

- VPN LAN-to-LAN with Ethernet encapsulation of SSL / TLS tunnel, 

- Router with static and dynamic 

- 802.1d bridge with Spanning Tree 

- Firewall Packet Filter and Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) 

- Control through Firewall and QoS classification of traffic type P2P file sharing; 

- NAT (Network Address Translation) 

- TCP / UDP port forwarding (PAT) to create Virtual Server 

- Multizone DNS server with automatic management of the Reverse Resolution in-addr.arpa; 

- Multi subnet DHCP server with the ability to assign IP address based on MAC address of the applicant; 

- 802.1Q Virtual LAN (tagged VLAN) applicable on Ethernet interfaces on LAN-to-LAN VPN, VPN and bonding on the bridge consisting of Ethernet interfaces, VPN, VPN and bonds; 

- PPPoE client to connect to the WAN via ADSL, DSL and cable 

- Dynamic DNS client used to easily reach even when the WAN IP is dynamic. 

- Client Server and NTP (Network Time Protocol); 

- Syslog server for receiving and cataloging the system logs produced by the remote hosts including Unix systems, routers, switches, Wi-Fi access points, network printers and others compatible with the syslog protocol; 

- Kerberos 5 authentication using an integrated KDC and cross-domain authentication; 

- Authorization LDAP, NIS and RADIUS; 

- X.509 Certificate Authority for issuing and managing electronic certificates; 

- Integration between Unix and Windows Active Directory on a single system of authentication and authorization using LDAP and Kerberos 5 cross realm authentication.