Folks,
Equipment. After seeing how much memory was being used with one user and all proxies I have beefed up my home ASG to 1.25gb of ddr400 memory. I also found that the Maxtor 160gb sata II drives use considerably les power therefore generate less heat than the IDE one I was using.
I had prebuilt a configuration on my test machine to make installation easier because of no migration at this stage from v6.3x to v7b.
1/. The dashboard
a/. looks great provides easy access to the menu items
b/. has some formating issues with the "anti virus" line
c/. does not work very well with IE 7, hangs or thinks the ASG is very busy when it is actually doing very little, happens when moving between a configuration change and next menu. Screen flashes during updates
d/. needs a faster update
e/. works well with FF 1.5 on linux (Mandriva 64) and FF2.x on XP SP2.
2/. Management menu
a/. fairly self explanatory for people moving from v6.xxx
b/. will be difficult for new comers
3/. Networks
a/. mainly self explanatory
b/. I didn't try out all the function, routing brifging, OSPF
c/. there is a bug in the interface (or maybe reporting) where the external interface doesn't show up on reports for 2 out of the 3 roles I tried CABLE DHCP and PPPoE. Works for statis IP address
4/. the inclusion of the NTP server is excellent and will reduce the licence count for me.
4/. Users
a/ for a home user the "users" is probably more than sufficient, but needs some explanation I think (probably the production "help file").
5/. Definitions
a/. won't be much of an issue for experienced users
b/. not as many services as in v6.xxx
c/. time layout different and not easy to see an overview of a majority of the settings - v6.x layout better from an admin point of view.
6/. Network security
a/. basic functionality the same in most of the sub menus, but laided out differently
b/. no (real) time packet filter report, makes it difficult to debug filters etc
7/. Web security
a/. about as clear as mud in a brown beer bottle
b/. there is a bug in the HTTPS part where it can't handle sites with java (bypassed with a PF rule for all users at the moment)
c/. editting http profiles the default value overides the previous value in the "time field" a bit of a trap.
d/. squid is a processor hog, my system has been running at 100% for about 1.5 hours with squid using 94%. 2 users playing games and me typing here. Thankfully the CPU has a decent amount of grunt. I will let it run until the morning and see if it has reduced when my sons finish their game sesssion.
8/. e-mail security
a/. pop3 not to bad, similar to v6.x with some nice extras but will definitely need a good manual to cover the new rule format.
b/. smtp for a home user has become very difficult. While my outgoing e-mail is using the proxy I can't work out how to get e-mail scanned. The requirement for an internal e-mail server address is more than likely the issue, but I don't weant one or need to put another machine on 24hr a day just of re-mail.
c/. tracking the missing quarantined e-mail;s is a bit of a chore.
d/. quarantined e-mails - all users get to see all e-mails in the end user portal!
e/. on what basis does the prefetch decide which e-mails it should fetch and how long does it keep them for?
f/. my ASG currently has prefetched approx 1400 e-mails in one day, now you see the need for a bigger disk.
I will add another post to this thread tomorrow about the other menu items.
Ian M