monowall vs pfsense
Solution 1:
"Monowall is first and foremost, a routing platform. Nothing more, nothing less. The distribution comes in two flavors, either for embedded systems or for regular PCs."
"pfSense is a hybrid of sorts, that has multiple sources for it’s major components. It was originally derived from monowall, but uses OpenBSD’s ported Packet Filter, a package management system to provide an integrated extensibility to the platform and Alternate Queuing (ALTQ) from FreeBSD"
From here: A little old, but still current.
Solution 2:
I have used Smoothwall for a long time, though I have been watching pfSense with great anticipation. I am kind of sad that third-party development for smoothwall seems to have largely died out since the great 2.0 days... thus I have been watching other products to see where they are going.
pfSense has an embedded version that is perfect for running from flash media. I think you will ultimately be much happier with it than monowall for what you describe as key criteria above, though I think it also is a touch more advanced so it might take a bit more elbow grease on your part to get it where you like it. But the best thing in my opinion, is that pfSense still seems to be a very active project.
Solution 3:
M0n0wall is good for you:
- Has traffic Shapping
- Can be installed in CF
Unfortunately, has no ssh and inner-working is a bit hidden - very little in exec.php
You might want to look at Zeroshell from www.zeroshell.net/eng. Has much more
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M0n0wall Captive Portal logout url - not pop-up window
Solution 4:
I have been useing pfSense myself without any hitche. I have also been considering trying out MoNowall since ipv6 is implemented from the get-go with it. I have tried load-balancing from both sides and configured ipv6 tunnels. I have installed both to systems, and specialized hardware. I use SSH for managing my box and like that it can do openBGP.