Smoothwall (formerly styled as SmoothWall) is a
Linux distribution
A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...
designed to be used as an
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
firewall
Firewall may refer to:
* Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts
* Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...
. Smoothwall is configured via a web-based
GUI and requires little or no knowledge of
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
to install or use.
Smoothwall is also a private software company based in the UK who specializes in the development of web content filtering, safeguarding and internet security solutions, which also maintains the SmoothWall
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
project.
History
Smoothwall began life as Smoothwall GPL in 2000 as a freely redistributable piece of open source software. In 2001, they released a proprietary version that is currently the primary distribution of the software containing extra features. Smoothwall still maintains its open source version with Smoothwall Express (latest release V3.1 in 2014). Smoothwall's filtering and safeguarding products are typically sold into educational organizations and businesses.
In 2017, Smoothwall announced a management buyout backed by private equity fund, Tenzing. The new management team was led by Georg Ell, previously Director of Western Europe at
Tesla, who was appointed as Group CEO in May 2018. Georg was joined by existing Board members Gavin Logan, Douglas Hanley and Manprit Randhawan in the management of the Smoothwall business, along with Lisa Stone, who took the position as chairperson.
On 5 August 2021, Tenzing announced
they had agreed to sell their investment in Smoothwall to Australian security firm
Family Zone Cyber Safety for
£75.5 million (
A$142m cash consideration.)
The deal was completed on 17 August 2021, with a £10.5m deferred balance of the sale price paid on 1 September 2021.
Smoothwall Express
Smoothwall Express, originally ''Smoothwall GPL'', is the freely distributable version of Smoothwall, developed by the Smoothwall Open Source Project team and members of Smoothwall Ltd.
Released in August 2000, Smoothwall GPL was developed by Lawrence Manning and Richard Morrell to provide a quick and easy-to-use solution to the problem of sharing their
ISDN
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services over the digitalised circuits of the public switched telephone network. ...
connections with the rest of their
LAN
Lan or LAN may refer to:
Science and technology
* Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics
* Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in space
* ...
. Created using
Red Hat Linux
Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004.
Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...
, Smoothwall GPL originally had two simple functions: control the modem to dial and hang up, and to route
TCP/IP
The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...
packets from the LAN to the Internet connection, and back again. The LAN was hidden from the public network by
NAT, applied using
ipchains
Linux IP Firewalling Chains, normally called ipchains, is free software to control the packet filter or firewall capabilities in the 2.2 series of Linux kernels. It superseded ipfirewall (managed by ipfwadm command), but was replaced by ipta ...
.
Beginning with 0.9 in August 2000, the Smoothwall GPL 0.9.x series went through several versions based on the 2.2 Linux
kernel
Kernel may refer to:
Computing
* Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems
* Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution
* Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming
* Kernel method, in machine learnin ...
, culminating in 0.9.9 SE in December 2001, which was probably the most popular GPL release. Each release led to a number of improvements, including
PAT (port address translation),
DMZ
A demilitarized zone (DMZ or DZ) is an area in which treaties or agreements between states, military powers or contending groups forbid military installations, activities, or personnel. A DZ often lies along an established frontier or boundary ...
,
PSTN
The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the aggregate of the world's telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local telephony operators. It provides infrastructure and services for public telephony. The PSTN consists ...
and ISDN dial-up support, broadband (
ADSL
Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is a type of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over Copper wire, copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem ...
and
Cable
Cable may refer to:
Mechanical
* Nautical cable, an assembly of three or more ropes woven against the weave of the ropes, rendering it virtually waterproof
* Wire rope, a type of rope that consists of several strands of metal wire laid into a hel ...
) support.
Smoothwall GPL 1.0 was released in December 2002, including all previously released patches and security fixes, and ended development of the 0.9.x/1.0 series, although it was supported by errata updates for another year and a half.
Smoothwall Limited
In late 2001, Manning and Morrell, with George Lungley, formed Smoothwall Limited as a UK-registered
private limited company
A private limited company is any type of business entity in Privately held company, "private" ownership used in many jurisdictions, in contrast to a Public company, publicly listed company, with some differences from country to country. Example ...
.
The company was formed to take the open source software and commercialise it, by expanding the software to include corporate and enterprise oriented functionality, and to provide dedicated
support
Support may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Supporting character
* Support (art), a solid surface upon which a painting is executed
Business and finance
* Support (technical analysis)
* Child support
* Customer support
* Income Su ...
staff for customers to contact.
Now based in Yarfort, with a
USA office in
Charlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte ( ) is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the county seat of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Mecklenburg County. The population was 874,579 at the 2020 United ...
, the company has continued to develop the commercial,
closed source
Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modi ...
Smoothwall product range, while moving from its initial direct sales model to a reseller, channel-based sales model.
Past Products
Smoothwall Server Edition was the first product from Smoothwall Ltd., released on 11 November 2001. It was essentially Smoothwall GPL 0.9.9 with support included from the company. This was — as were virtually all future products — made available to purchase on
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...
directly from Smoothwall Ltd. by mail order.
Initially announced in January 2002, and priced at £30, but never released,
Smoothwall Home Server was an aborted attempt to tap into the home and residential market. It used the open source platform again as a base but included SmoothGuard, and would have permitted customers to make email support requests directly from Smoothwall Ltd.
Released on 17 December 2001, Smoothwall Corporate Server 1.0 was the first in a long line of separate, closed source releases from Smoothwall Ltd. Forked from Smoothwall GPL 0.9.9SE, Corporate Server included additional features such as
SCSI
Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...
support, and the capability to increase functionality via add-on modules. These modules included SmoothGuard (content filtering proxy), SmoothZone (multiple
DMZ
A demilitarized zone (DMZ or DZ) is an area in which treaties or agreements between states, military powers or contending groups forbid military installations, activities, or personnel. A DZ often lies along an established frontier or boundary ...
) and SmoothTunnel (advanced VPN features). Corporate Server was designed to become the backbone of all future products from the company, with the module functionality permitting customers to select the exact level of functionality they required. Further modules have been released over time, each providing a particular set of functionality, such as
traffic shaping
Traffic shaping is a bandwidth management technique used on computer networks which delays some or all datagrams to bring them into compliance with a desired ''traffic profile''. Traffic shaping is used to optimize or guarantee performance, improv ...
, and
email
Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...
anti-virus
Antivirus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware.
Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name ...
and
anti-spam
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email).
No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email ( false positives) as opposed ...
.
After Daniel Barron, author of
DansGuardian, joined the company in April 2002, a variant of Corporate Server called Smoothwall Corporate Guardian was released, integrating a fork of DansGuardian called SmoothGuardian. Corporate Guardian is a stand-alone web proxy, cache and filtering solution. SmoothGuardian was also made available as a stand-alone module for Corporate Server customers, replacing the SmoothGuard module.
School guardian was created as a variant of corporate guardian, adding
Active Directory
Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. Windows Server operating systems include it as a set of processes and services. Originally, only centralized domain management used Active Direct ...
/
LDAP
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed Directory service, directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) networ ...
authentication
Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an Logical assertion, assertion, such as the Digital identity, identity of a computer system user. In contrast with iden ...
support and firewall features in a package designed specifically for use in schools.
When released on 13 June 2005, version 4 of Corporate Server was renamed to Corporate Firewall. In February 2008, Corporate Guardian was renamed to Network Guardian with the release of the 2008 version.
Released on 9 May 2005, Smoothwall Advanced Firewall targeted the enterprise market directly by bundling Corporate Server with all available add-on modules, and adding further functionality, including Active Directory,
eDirectory & LDAP authentication and the capability to use up to 20 network interfaces with external connection load balancing.
In April 2007, the company released the SmoothGuard UTM-1000
hardware appliance, based on a commodity
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
Core 2 Duo
Intel Core is a line of multi-core (with the exception of Core Solo and Core 2 Solo) central processing units (CPUs) for midrange, embedded, workstation, high-end and enthusiast computer markets marketed by Intel Corporation. These processors ...
1
U 19-inch
rack-mountable chassis. The UTM-1000 came pre-installed with a variant of Smoothwall Advanced Firewall.
Awards
* Reader's vote, ''
Linux Format
''Linux Format'' was the UK's first Linux-specific magazine, and as of 2013 was the best-selling Linux title in the UK. It was also exported to many countries worldwide. It was published by Future plc (which produces a number of other computer ma ...
'', Best Security Tool, 2001.
*''Supplier of the Year'' - Highly Commended, Education Resources Awards, 2017.
*''Cyber Security - Software and Technology Excellence Awards'', Worldwide Business Review, 2017.
References
External links
Smoothwall Limited*http://www.smoothwall.org
* Computer Reseller News
Advancing Firewall Protection (2006-01-09)
* Network Computing
Rollout: Smoothwall's Corporate Guardian 5(2006-09-28)
* Information Week
Build This Cheap But Effective Firewall(2007-01-29)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Smoothwall
X86-64 Linux distributions
Firewall software
Free routing software
Content-control software
Gateway/routing/firewall distribution
Linux distributions