I have been looking at open source firewall/router solutions for a while, and my list of requirements has been pretty steep. In particular, any solution I give a recommendation to would need to support WAN load balancing and SIP (for VOIP phones). I also recently added dynamic DNS to that list.

Today I am pleased to say that I have a working solution using pfSense 1.2.2 (http://www.pfsense.com/). I had done a comparison between pfsense and vyatta a while back, and found issues with both that prevented it from being a solution I can recommend.

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I have been working with SFTP (FTP over Secure Shell, so is thus encrypted), and needed a free or low cost solution to setup an SFTP server on windows (not to be confused with FTPS, which is a bit different). I came across this great blog entry from www.digitalmediaminute.com, so this information comes from them with a few minor updates from me.

This tutorial will help you turn your Windows based system into a SecureFTP (SFTP) server.

Background

Secure Shell (SSH) is a program that lets you log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another. It provides strong authentication and secure communications over insecure channels. When using ssh, the entire login session, including transmission of password, is encrypted and therefore is very secure.

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Get ready for acronym overload.

A while back, I write a blog entry about pfSense, and mentioned that it was a worthwhile project.  Now I want to mention Vyatta, which is another open source router project.  While pfSense is based on BSD and has a fancy web interface, Vyatta is based on Linux, and only has CLI (command line interface).

As a general rule the CLI is not really a huge problem for me, especially since Vyatta has a PDF reference manual outlining the different commands.

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