I want to set up a firewall for a small office. I have a server on which I can install an OS of my choice. I was thinking of trying pfSense but ran into some testing problems and tried IPFIre (Linux based). Hence I will only be referring to the last one here.
IPFIre is easy and fast to setup via the web interface. However, when it comes to configuring certain tools (such as rsyslog forwarding, a Suricata IDS, any other tools I could think of later), I would prefer using the usual CLI and terminal rather than a web interface that I don't fully control/understand. Also, setting things directly from a terminal in IPFire so far seemed to me complicated (at least, different from the Linux I know and not so documented).
These consideration might be wrong as I haven't been studying the case much.
My question is: would it be bad idea to build my own firewall from a Debian 8 (using iptables and other relevant tools, such as Squid proxy/filter, Suricata within the office, etc.)?
EDIT 1: I can take the time necessary to build such firewall and have some knowledge (I would guess enough) in iptables. The requirements for the firewall are quite basic. Concerning traffic, an OpenVPN bridge and HTTP(S).
I am just wondering whether these Firewall distributions (IPFire, pfSense, etc.) had specific protections that would be very hard/impossible to implement in a "normal" Linux OS such as Debian.