I have dumped my old firewall out of frustration with its aging software and lackluster support. (Netmax is very cheap in price, but the lack of even forum support and horribly ancient software more than makes it expensive.)
Ok, things that I like about Astaro...
1) Good up to date software. Only outstanding issue in 3.202 is the OpenSSH problem.
2) fast interface. Major plus here.
3) good range of proxys.
4) Level of logging is great. All the the important logs are retrievable via the web interface.
5) The daemons are running in a chrooted environment. (At least the major service providing ones are (except SSH, but that one isnt realistic :-))
Things that I dont like or havent figured out yet.
1) No Dialout support. This means no PPP over Serial or ISDN backup support. While not a show stopper it did add a few hours of time to get the machine to a usable state on my home network.
(I am very happy that at least a current version of pppd ships with it :-))
2) No REAL support for custom rules. This is a fairly big issue. Please consider it for future revisions. My ruleset is fairly complicated as several of my machines have IPSEC tunnels to other networks. (Talk about a nightmare... IPSEC clients going though NAT to get to thier public VPN server.) iptables is a monster, but a very powerful one :-)
3) Strange licensing teirs. Every other firewall out there provide a more ala-carte approach to product tiering. I would have rather not had VPN support or have it at an additional fee... (small per VPN or set of clients) and instead had larger IP space.
Number 3 actually is holding me back from transitioning one of customers (A church that is actually moderately technically savvy.) to Astaro :-( Since all they use is surf protection and NAT for thier 45 desktop machines, it turned out that they could purchase a SonicWall PRO 200 (including the hardware) for the same price :-(
Overall though, I am very impressed with this product. It has very much going for it and very little against. My only wish is that you had a more ala-carte offering with agressive pricing for home non-commercial use. (It doesnt need to be free. (Although that is Nice :-)) If I can figure the last few nits out with my VPN tunnelling THROUGH the firewall, then I will be sticking with this one.
[size="1"][ 09 July 2002, 01:53: Message edited by: Ronald A. McCormick ][/size]
This thread was automatically locked due to age.