Firewalls: Linux system or proprietary

[dracus at primenet.com (James Hunter Heinlen)]

Greetings, all....

The company I work for is looking to upgrade our firewalls from
Sonicwalls to something that will allow us to form a VPN, allow rather
flexible monitoring (preferably with automated reports), and secure
the network.  Since I am the sysadmin (*shudder*), I have been looking
at our options.  We are considering some proprietary boxes (Cisco,
Nokia, etc), a Linux based pre-built (West Guard), and building a
firewall from a Linux box (we use Xelix and Red Hat for our servers).
I was wondering if anyone here had any experience with firewalls of
this type, and could recommend routes to look into (and some to avoid).
Please, if you have any experience in this field, I will appreciate
hearing from you.  Thank you for your time.

Hunter

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