SmoothWall Announces Express 3 On Fifth Anniversary
2 September, 2005 – On the fifth anniversary of the first SmoothWall firewall, Internet security specialist SmoothWall Limited is pleased to announce the availability of the first test version of SmoothWall Express 3, the latest version of the world’s most popular firewall appliance software.
Express 3 is based on the latest Linux 2.6 kernel and features a new open architecture designed to make it easy for software developers to produce their own security components for SmoothWall. This is intended to foster the development of new and improved open source software, to the benefit of the open source movement as a whole. SmoothWall Limited will actively encourage this process and provide financial support to the development of components that it feels address common security needs.
“Express 2 has become the benchmark Linux firewall against which all others are compared,” said George Lungley, Managing Director of SmoothWall Ltd. “We set out to create a free firewall that could be used by anybody with a modicum of IT knowledge; ease-of-use and thorough, yet simple to understand documentation were our primary goals. Express 2 has been phenomenally successful, helped by magazine cover disk distribution throughout the world that introduced Express 2 and Linux to a wide and diverse audience.”
“It is now five years since we posted the original “Smoothie’ to the SourceForge community website and we were almost swept away by the tide of volunteers wanting to help,” said Lawrence Manning, Co-Founder of the SmoothWall Project and Development Director of SmoothWall Ltd. “SmoothWall has grown far beyond whatever I imagined was possible at that time, but now it is time to move on again, to the next generation, Express 3.”
Since its launch in December 2003, there have been over one million registered installations of SmoothWall Express 2, with the United States holding the highest number of installation at 22 per cent. The United Kingdom comes in second with 11.8 per cent and Australia a close third at 10.4 per cent. Although it is now nearly two years old, installation figures for the last six months are still averaging over 60,000 per month.
SmoothWall Express turns a redundant PC into a dedicated appliance firewall, providing perimeter defence for all the computers attached to the local computer network. This provides more robust protection than a can a personal firewall running on the same computer and operating system that it is trying to protect, for perimeter defence stops an attack before it reaches its vulnerable target.
SmoothWall Express is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). For more information about the new and improved features of Express 3 please visit www.smoothwall.org, from where both versions 2 and 3 are available to download free of charge via numerous mirror sites worldwide.