Is SmoothWall a good firewall alternative?

I found this linux distribution, called SmoothWall. I read its documentation and it looks pretty for me. The only problem is, that I'm not a big linux professional and I have also not a lot of experience but I want to know your thoughts about this "Firewall OS"! Can it be used for small-business environment, with 15-17 PC-s?

I would use the server also as cache proxy. Is this a good idea? (I mean, using one server for two things)

From serverfault Oden

• Yes, SmoothWall is generally considered to be pretty decent. It is relatively up to date, easy to use, uses modern tools, and popular.

  From Jed Daniels

• Well...it works, if you set up the hardware correctly. It's not really a "linux" thing since it's meant to be turnkey, and managed from a web interface.

  If you have the hardware with multiple NICs, you aren't losing anything by trying it out. The only expense is the hardware. If you don't like it, you download a different distro.

  Other people will have different opinions. Mine is that you are only losing time if you try it, don't like it, and try another one until you find one that suits your needs.

  Oden : And witch distro would you prefer for this task?

  Bart Silverstrim : I've used Smoothwall for something similar to what you're describing before, worked fine.

  Bart Silverstrim : Again, it depends on your own expectations and what shiny's you want in the interface, what stats you do or don't want, what features...for me it worked. A friend of mine uses an older machine with pfsense for routing and firewalling and likes that. So...I've used smoothwall and think it was fine to use, but other distros are capable at handling basic firewall chores too. Not really a right-or-wrong thing so much as a personal taste thing. That's why I encourage you to try it firsthand and see if it handles what you throw at it.
  From Bart Silverstrim

• Smoothwall and a number of other firewall distros were reviewed at the weekend by Tech Radar. You should take a look at that page and compare. One distro not mentioned is Untangle, which I've been pretty happy with - though the most useful parts of Untangle are commercial addons rather than opensource.

  If you're not entirely sure then just download one or two of these distros and have a play, either on a spare box or a virtual machine. Any of these should manage 15-17 users pretty easily on relatively cheap hardware, especially if you don't go mad turning on every single feature.

  From kaerast

• I'm using Smoothwall Express 3.0 at home right now and it has major problems. I have an extremely basic setup and it keeps locking up (I have to hard reboot) when I am downloading a large file via torrent.

  My setup is as follows:

  [Road Runner] ---- [Smoothwall] ---- [Netgear GS108 (8-port Gigabit Switch)] ---- [Several other machines]

  This is the most basic setup you can have and it's great when it works but it keeps failing (not gracefully at all) and it's bugging the hell out of me. I have tried tweaking a few settings to no avail. I will have to try something else.

  From Joe Philllips