Which Firewall shall i use?

Hi Cheetah, I agree with you that specialists are not born but made, however I was talking about firewal design being a specialist field. Your everyday Joe Admin whos manager wants him to deploy some security within a week does not have the time nor the inclination to learn how to build a simple firewall -- let alone build a secure firewall. As a result of this most people will go with a commercial product.

The economics of it are simple -- its specialisation -- and when you have division of labour with each person focusing on a specific activity and becoming a master in it, you reap benefits. Yes you could argue that Joe Admin should study the black arts and become an elite firewall sorceror (like us chaps on firewall.cx ) but invariably he has more than enough on his plate.

Point two, lets begin by clarifying that I'm an open-source zealot (my current desktop wallpaper is the Linux penguin dressed as Uma Thurman and it says 'Kill Bill' below), however all software cannot be free.

To quote from the Free Software Foundation site:

The word ``free'' has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of ``free software'', we're talking about freedom, not price. Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.

In fact the Free Software Foundation encourage people to sell software at the highest price they can get.

Under the GNU GPL which all free software is distributed, the right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software.

Redhat understood this and started selling support -- but only after making a clear distinction between their (commercial) Enterprise Linux product and their now spun off free desktop version Fedora.

The only requirement for 'free software' is that the source is given out along with the program free of charge. Lets be honest here -- how many free software projects have you looked at the source for, or better yet -- contributed to the code. That is actually contributing to the open source movement.

For most people its about a free ride where they can download tools for free and use them without giving anything back to the community. I am guilty of this myself, but not for lack of trying -- I have reviewed the code for a lot of open source projects, especially nmap, but have never made a contribution to the code.

You cannot have a company that distributes programs commercially free and still pays their programmers. Whether they are charging you for a license or support -- they do have to charge you to survive.

Anyway since we're both wayyyy off topic, I'll start another thread for this if people are interested in carrying on the debate.

Cheers,

try using the pix firewall 501 soho its really kool and since cisco is relasing the new codes for it 7.0 u would have a lot of free features in it also...................................

......the magic word ..... pix

I'll be getting my 515 in the next couple of days here in the office and I can't wait to play with it!

Hey!!!!!

Where are all these great firewalls coming from?

Is there a firewall fire sale? :lol:

Get in line mate !

hey chris

instead of pix 515 try 515e it has more feature than pix 515