Dale's Weblog

Smoothwall Express 2.0 Vs. ISA 2004

Okay well I’ve played around with ISA 2004 for a bit and have made a quick conclusion. First problem (and really the only) I had with ISA is that for some reason it doesn’t automatically "dial" my ADSL connection. If I manually dialed the connection it worked fine. That is a bit dodgy because it means you’ll need to redial if the connection is dropped or the computer is restarted. Now I’m thinking that is more my fault in not knowing how to set it up although I followed the document from Microsofts website explaining it although it still didn’t work. A work around would be to have the modem handle the PPPoE connection and not ISA. Although ISA isn’t really meant for a small dodgy ADSL link, we’re talking about E1 2mbit links with lots of static ip addresses: p
Another downside is that it doesn’t come with a web interface, although I’m told you can get plugins for this.
Now to ISAs funky features.
When you first install it EVERYTHING is blocked: web access, pinging everything. At first I thought that it just wasn’t working: p
Anyway ISA has some really cool features. For example I setup an "access list" to block pdf documents and all attempts to download a pdf file were redirected to google. Or you could go with a more basic thing and redirect all clients from a certain IP address range to a certain website. What is cool is that you can have different access lists for different users or ip addresses. That is about all I played around with. You can do things like VPNs and stuff like that too.

SmoothWall is really just a router; it comes with basic port forwarding. Although it has a nice web interface and it is really easy to setup. ISA is a bit of a beast, there are so many options.

For basic connections I’d use SmoothWall. It forwards packets faster than ISA (ISA checks all coming stuff and can get slow if the computer is crap) and is easy to setup. For large networks that need different settings for different users ISA is the way to go. I love the options that it comes with.

ISA is for big business (with big wallets) and SmoothWall is great for home use (and its free).

I shall continue to use Smoothwall as I don’t need all these features. Both programs are great.