Smoothwall has long offered a range of software-based security tools targeted at the small business market.

Tools which the company has now integrated together and ported onto a hardware device to provide a complete Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution.

The hardware on which the new Smoothguard 1000-UTM appliance is based is amazingly well specified, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor plus 1GB of DDR2 memory and a 60GB Sata hard disk to hold both the OS and the Smoothwall software.

You also get seven Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be variously used to connect to local subnets or the internet and to set up demilitarised zones (DMZ) for public-facing servers. VLan support is another built-in option along with load balancing and failover support across the ports, with automatic failover to a standby appliance also available if required.

The software is a combination of several existing Smoothwall products, providing a host of security tools which can be split into four main areas.

The first of these involves the company’s own stateful inspection firewall, which can protect all the external and internal interfaces plus the DMZ ports. Dynamic and static Nat (Network Address Translation) facilities are provided along with support for Layer 7 packet analysis to facilitate the built-in Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) facilities.

Accompanying the firewall is a virtual private network (VPN) gateway, which can be used to handle both site-to-site and remote-user tunnelling, with no licensing limits on the number of tunnels that can be configured. The Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol (L2TP) is recommended for remote users as it doesn’t require any additional client software, although IPSec and a range of encryption technologies are also supported.

To protect web users, there is a set of 16 separately configurable security policies that use Smoothwall’s Dynamic Content Analysis (DCA) technology to categorise and filter out content on the fly. And it’s possible to block objectionable material and examine web pages for, and screen out, embedded viruses, spyware, browser exploits and other malicious code. Security policies can be assigned to specific Active Directory and other authentication groups and further customised depending on the time of day.

The 1000-UTM protects email systems by screening out viruses and spam from Pop3-retrieved and SMTP-delivered messages. Open relay and phishing protection is also provided, along with facilities to quarantine suspect messages and remove attachments.

Management is via the usual browser-based interface, which is fairly easy to use, if a little packed with options. Indeed, the only real issue we had with the Smoothguard appliance was the sheer number and range of settings available. That said, it didn’t take us long to get the unit up and working on our test network, and to help with content filtering, there’s a policy archive that can be downloaded to get you started.

The rest of the settings, though, are up to the company and network concerned, and careful reading of the comprehensive documentation is recommended before making any changes.

Comprehensive reporting and alerting tools complete the package, and there’s no doubting its ability to handle large numbers of connections. It may be a little pricey for the very small organisation but is otherwise a good security solution.