The Purpose of IPCop

IPCop is a firewall for the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) network, which is extremely easy to use. It provides most of the basic features that you would expect a modern firewall to have, and what is most important is that it sets this all up for you in a highly automated and simplified way. It's very easy to get an IPCop system up and running and takes hardly any time.

For features such as those in IPCop, we would usually have to pay for a high-end firewall system or string something together with a collection of other tools. IPCop takes some of these powerful tools and creates a pre-built package for us.

IPCop was created to fill what appears to be a void in the market, where users with small networks need some features that generally only large networks can afford, as far as the requirement for expertise or money is concerned. This book hopes to provide the additional expertise to make an adequate replacement for a commercial product really shine, as well as give a look at how to set up IPCop in a number of different scenarios.