CacheGuard - Turn any machine into an internet security gateway

Hello Product Hunt!

I'm the solo developer behind CacheGuard, and I want to share something I rarely talk about publicly.

It started in 1997.

Not as a startup. Not with funding. With a dusty 80286 desktop, a 9600-baud modem, a single PC on my home LAN, and a Linux kernel 2.0 running ipfwadm as a firewall.

At the time, barely anyone around me knew what a firewall was. The only commercial firewall product I was really aware of was Check Point FW-1, shipped on a Solaris CD.

I was freelancing as a C/C++/lisp developer for telecom companies, building things by day and exploring network security on the side.

Then, around 2000, something changed.

I joined a project at another telecom company and saw network security appliances being used in production for the first time: a dedicated firewall, a commercial web proxy/cache appliance, and another appliance for URL filtering.

Three different boxes.

I already had a background in systems development, and I knew how these technologies worked.

So I started wondering: What if one machine could do all of this?

That question became the beginning of CacheGuard.

Between 2000 and 2002, I was coding on weekends and late into the nights. Sometimes 18-hour stretches. Nobody was paying me to do it. I simply couldn't stop.

In 2002, I shipped my first three hardware appliance models, combining firewall and URL-filtering proxy functionality.

It wasn't a success.

But I didn't stop.

Over the years, CacheGuard evolved into CacheGuard-OS, a network appliance-oriented operating system specifically designed to turn standard x86/x64 hardware or virtual machines into integrated network security gateways.

Today, CacheGuard-OS can turn a standard x86/x64 server or virtual machine into a network security and traffic optimization gateway.

It combines functions including:

• DHCP, PPPoE and static WAN IP

• Stateful firewall

• IPsec VPN

• QoS and traffic shaping

• Web caching

• Web compression

• Traffic logging

• Web proxy

• Web antivirus

• URL filtering

• SSL inspection

• Reverse proxy

• WAF (Web Application Firewall)

• Web application load balancing

• Centralized management

One of the things I'm particularly proud of is that these functions are designed to run together on the same system.

CacheGuard-OS is built on top of well-known open-source technologies including Linux, Netfilter, iproute2, Squid, strongSwan, ClamAV, Apache, ModSecurity and others.

I'm not trying to hide that.

The interesting part of the project is not simply using those technologies. It's the engineering work required to integrate them into one coherent network gateway: the operating system, architecture, configuration, management layer and the way the different network functions work together.

And now, after many years of development, I've taken another important step:

• The CacheGuard-OS source code is publicly available on GitHub.

• The latest release is CacheGuard-OS 2.6.3.

• The project remains free and open source, with no user or gateway limits.

• This is still a one-person, self-funded project.

One important thing I want to clarify: CacheGuard is not a new product. It has been around for many years, evolving through continuous development. But for various reasons, it has remained largely under the radar. I've spent most of my time building and improving the technology rather than promoting it.

Now, I'd like to change that. I'm sharing CacheGuard here on Product Hunt because I want more people to discover the project, try it, explore the source code, and tell me what they think. After all these years of development, it feels like the right time to bring CacheGuard out of the shadows and introduce it to a much wider community.

There is a lot more I'd like to build, improve and document. But at this stage, I'm particularly interested in getting the project in front of people who actually understand networking, Linux, security and infrastructure.

If you're a sysadmin, network engineer, security engineer, Linux developer, or simply interested in how a network security gateway can integrate all these functions into one system, I'd genuinely like to hear your thoughts.

What would you want to inspect first in an open-source network security appliance?

Ask me anything below.