Of Firewalls and Men

Work I rarely rave about a product. Not much todays is cool enough for me to really fall in love with. But today is an exception. I just messed with my first "smoothwall" firewall and it was great. We have here a sonicwall firewall for our cable modem to server connection so that customers can access their ad's. well that junk sonicwall we have causes problems at every turn. configuration is cryptic, the machine constantly spams you with "buy this new add on for your firewall!" and it's log emailing is absolute crap... it can not send you the logs at most Isp's because it demands to send as the target addresss. Today I finally got fed up. we paid lots of money for this crap, have a spare in the closet that I know will never get used, and we need a solution that actually works.

so I started searching, everything that is a linux firewall is manually configured, nothing with a nice click and drool pretty web interface... except for smoothwall.

After messing with it for 2 days now. This thing called smoothwall really rocks. It blows away every other firewall I have used from nokia to cisco to that junk called sonicwall.

I suggest to everyone that they download it and mess with it on a test thrwoaway machine. (A Pentium 200 with 64 meg of ram is plenty of machine for it to serve a medium sized company.) it really is that good, and at the cost of the hardware you can build 5 of them to have four of them as ready to go spares sitting on the shelf collecting dust.