I agree to your postings and I am also disappointed that they have disabled the snort thing. Disabling a feature due to 3rd party licensing is for sure but they should keep in mind that the most bugs were discovered by "Home User" because the have the ability to fumble around with the ASL. In a productive environment the danger of doing very bad things let the most admins keep their settings for ever and ever - okay adjusting spam rules or up2date things....
Pleaseeeeeee enable the Snort Feature for Home Users. They wouldn't disappoint you.
First IDS/IPS is not "industry standard" as of right now and is mostly found on huge hardware style firewalls that cost 5-10x more than astaro.
Second, those that DO include IPS rarely have the ability to call on such a constatly updated and quality database such as the snort project.
From a company point of View, The inclusion of IDS and IPS saves money. And it seems VERY Funny that a lot of people here seem to require this for their "home license".
I'll be curious to see when/if astaro implements a "harder" licensing scheme how many people are bit in the ass...
Some of us would like it for our measly home licenses, BEFORE we implement on purchased licenses... what is so hard to understand about that? Through my recommendations, Astaro has gotten over $15K in initial purchases from my employer and our clients. Add on top of that annual renewals.
Also, we are not asking for the up2dates for free. Only the ability to enable the subsystem.
And for 5-10x the pricing point, Cisco PIX 501, under 1000.00, and has basic IDS/IPS. Netscreen also has it, and several others all similarly priced.
1) I cannot see anywhere in this thread where anybody has stated that it is industry standard. It was described as "near" and somebody else referenced "almost". Astaro has always been on the leading edge of firewall technology and has always set the benchmark for “standard” features before they were even considered “standard” by the industry. “I” believe Snort should be one of these features & I guess Astaro has too by including it!
2) There are many lower-end firewall products around that support Snort, Eg. "smoothwall".
3) I believe, like you that a commercial installation should pay for Snort & yes it is a cost saving for companies. I am about to order my Snort licenses for my commercial sites. As we all know the great people at Astaro are not working for charity.
4) You may feel that people do not require Snort on home firewalls. That is your opinion - I do not agree with it and it would seem that there are others who use Astaro who would not agree with you either. I run at home a web-server & I want to know when somebody is trying to attack or probe it along with a magnitude of other problems that Snort can detect. As it seems these days it is not a mater of “if” more of “when”. Yes, I can implement Snort on another box if I really wish but again “I” believe Snort should be integrated into the firewall device (like Astaro has done!). Although there seems to be much debate on this raging on where a IDS should be located.
Let’s not lose sight that Snort is provided to us all under the GNU General Public License along with a rather large database of the attack/probe signatures free of charge. Yes, I realise there has been a lot of time, effort & money invested by Astaro integrating Snort into their product but I do believe it should be a standard feature & as such free for home users.
considering Snort has the ability to detect and kill p2p traffic and with all the lawsuits flying around p2p activity for home users turning htis on would be a boon and give Astaro some great recognition. Also smoothies snort is passive..it only detects it is not setup to stop attacks or unwanted traffic.
