Born as a fork of IPCop, IPFire joined the Open Invention Networkin April 2015. At the end of last week, version 2.29 Core 187 was released, packing a feature that improves the protection against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

According to the official release announcement, "Now, IPFire can use TCP SYN cookies to protect infrastructure behind it better against SYN flood attacks. This is especially useful in high-bandwidth scenarios and cloud deployments and can be activated with only one checkbox separately for each firewall rule." Previously, this hardened Linux distro that was built to perform as a router and a firewall provided good protection against DoS attacks, but it was limited if TCP connections terminated at the firewall, for example for reverse proxies.

As a side note, it should also be noted that the IPFire Project has published a free Internet geolocation database under the Creative Commons License, which is currently being used by The Tor Project to pinpoint nodes and relays.

Those looking for a good firewall solution for small office/home office applications can currently grab the Fortinet FortiGate 60Foff Amazon at 8% off, a discount that brings the $335.16 list price down to $307.24. This price is for the hardware only, but bundles that include FortiCare Premium and FortiGuard Enterprise Protection are also available.