[plug] Looking for Router/Firewall replacement software

[Tim White]

Hey Everyone.

Hoping someone out there has a good solution they have found already.

Basically a company I work for has a number of great Snapgear routers, 
which are no longer produced. One of them is already inadequate (no VLAN 
support) and given that they are EOL, I want to have a their future 
replacement already lined up. Having looked at a number of hardware 
routers, I'm tending towards a virtual router, one of the reasons being 
lower cost (hopefully), the other being that we have a lot of virtual 
machines, and so kinda makes sense to have a virtual server. (It also 
means if I need more routers in the future, i just create another one as 
I need).

Unfortunately, most software based routers I've seen tend to go with a 
yearly pricing model to get all the features, which is absolutely 
expensive in the long term for what is essentially a low level router 
(but still needs to be better than SOHO routers). Most of the other 
software routers I've looked at have shocking UI's, and while I know 
that big boys program routers in CLI (I've done my Cisco, so I'm not 
scared of CLI routers), it can be very nice to have a GUI for when you 
need to monitor things, or make changes.

So the things I'm looking for in a router:
* IPSEC
* PPTP Server (with support for Radius auth)
* VLAN's
* Multiple WAN's (and multiple IP's per WAN)
* Ideally a nice firewall interface

One of the features I really like in the Snapgear interface is the 
ability to define names for things, so subnets/interfaces/addresses and 
then use those names in the firewall config. Especially useful if you 
change an address, you just update the definition and the firewall is 
updated.

I'm currently trying pfSense, and while it works, it's not being as 
useful as I'd like. Vyatta was hopefully going to be one of my choices, 
but they removed the Gui from the community version and the commercial 
versions aren't in the price range.

I'm almost at the stage of just installing a Debian box with Ferm for 
the firewall and doing it all manually. At the end of the day, Snapgears 
are just Linux routers with a nice gui.

Tim