i am shure astaro team reads all posts, but i think they have not time to answer all posts. they invest the answer time in develop [;)]
Astaro-Report-Manager is an new feature to do a central reporting for asl-firewalls, e.g. you have to administrate a lot of, you can central see what happens. also you can correlate you data.
[ QUOTE ] I stand by what i have near the beginning of this thread. It is not ridiculous to question the logic of adding features to a codebase with obvious stability problems. I am glad it runs for you just fine at everywhere you have deployed it....but a vast majority on these forums are not. It bothers me that you have to throw a 2.4 ghz p-4 with half a gig of ram at a piece of software to get it to run nicely. Even windows xp is not that demanding.
I have to once again disagree with you steve. Some posts here my be over the top but ..but i am standing by mine.
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Our company is one of the largest and most active Astaro partners in the United States. We've stood side by side with them at Networld/Interop in Las Vegas, we've had input to some of the improvements in the product, we are personally acquainted with much of Astaro's US management, and we have a hotline to Astaro support. You don't have to believe me, but what I am telling you is the truth. Astaro is by no means dropping the ball on fixing bugs, they're not risking destabilizing their product by adding this feature (isn't that really for THEM to determine?), and they are actively and voraciously working on closing out any discrepancy reports. And I will reitirate what I said before: ASL V5 is plenty stable for production deployment. I can also tell you that about 75 percent of the time, difficulties with the product can be traced to configuration issues.
[ QUOTE ] That flies in the face of a few updates ago when the codebase was even more unstable where you mentioned you had to stop deployment of ASL because of instabilities.
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'Tis true that there were problems in the earlier releases of v5 that were significant enough to cause us to delay deployment. But those days have been gone for months now. Sure, there's more work for Astaro to do, but isn't this always the case for virtually any piece of software? We shouldn't look to Astaro for perfection, we should look to them for action -- and I think they're delivering on that level quite well.
As a network engineer, I work with firewalls of many makes and models on a variety of networks -- everything from the cheap, consumer-grade junk in the stores to Ciscos, Gauntlet, etc. I would take Astaro any day, warts and all, over ANY other firewall. It has an unmatched price vs. features vs. performance ratios that put its competitors to shame. Astaro is the most user-friendly, easy to deploy and administer, cost-effective, feature-rich security solution on the market - period! So what if a few things aren't quite up to snuff yet, we know they're working hard to fix them and it will be fixed soon enough. None of the problems are "show stoppers", either -- just work around them for now. For example, we all know that the content filtering (more often, the web antivirus scanning) is causing some slowdowns. If the slowdowns are a problem, just shut off content filtering temporarily. Life as we know it will not end if content filtering is disabled for a few weeks until a fix is deployed. ASL is quite sound and there's no reason to not use it.
you think that you are a really nice guy?! let me ask you something - would you eat sh.. if it's for free or cheap enough with a lot of features? we're talking about the stability of asl and not whether it's cheap or not -> i'm a homeuser and i use it for free, well that's nice, but i think it's ok to get an answer what's going on with this product.
but it seems that you should better keep watching out the bargain-basements
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As I have said before, I have 7 ASL installations which all run perfectly stable. I run v5 @ home on a P3-600MHz 256MB ram... no problems... with content filtering, IDS, AV, and HA modes....
As I have said before, I have 7 ASL installations which all run perfectly stable. I run v5 @ home on a P3-600MHz 256MB ram... no problems... with content filtering, IDS, AV, and HA modes....
And no.. I would not eat sh..
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Hi,
Redman...why telling users of your p3 600GHZ/256MB with all features enabled works well....?
THANKS for let them think they are right, shouting out unstable and buggy with such minimum Hardware.
ASL 5.025 isnt very supportable with such Hardware you posted and all the features enabled, sorry.
Are you really running v5.023 + web/av enabled ?
I agree with you that V5 runs stable , i have many installations aswell and am lucky with that Product.
I only have one thing open,and that is the HTTP-Proxy "Bug" introduced in v5.023 with AV enabled...and thats very bad stuff because it affects each user of the firewall.
Cannot tell my !paying! Customers that they should disable WEB/AV scanning....cannot tell them that we have to make a new installation because of this issue.
Hope this issue will be resolved SOON.
OfficeDefender, I've been using Astaro for a LONG time and it seems to me that the companies attitude has changed around about the initial v5 release.
I'm sure Astaro have a development schedule, but there are simply a lot of issues that are causing a lot of paid up users hassle. My personal beef is the SSL encryption being now enforced on the SMTP authentication. Yes there's a workaround, and yes a solution has been promised. However new up2dates are overwriting the recommended fix, meaningwe have to go re-edit. (Not to mention warranty being voided by having to do this).
My corporate installations are running fine, a few niggly issues like the SMTP thing and spiking graphs. (Which has also been happening a long time).
OfficeDefender, you can't just temporarily shut off a feature that's causing problems without repercussions.
Users start asking what the hell is going on and sometimes things like that fly in the face of corporate IT policies. (Sorry guys I have to let porn sites through again coz the filter aint working right, just please don't sue us in the meantime for exposing you to porn).
My organisation isn't that bad (and I decide IT policy), but I know of sites for which those statements are VERY applicable.
As stated in my prior post, something changed with v5, the QC on releases seems a lot worse, (you yourself were getting fed up at one point). And yes it's better now, but some people are still having serious issues.
I'd say 95% of all these whines would go away if Astaro just kept us better informed.
You probably are chatting to them everyday and have inside knowledge, most people here only see what's written on the forum.
Can you tell me when Astaro are going to stop my systems whining to me daily about licensing issues and when we can stop having to custom configure our firewalls so that license counts don't skyrocket when we get portscanned?
Redman...why telling users of your p3 600GHZ/256MB with all features enabled works well....? THANKS for let them think they are right, shouting out unstable and buggy with such minimum Hardware. ASL 5.025 isnt very supportable with such Hardware you posted and all the features enabled, sorry. Are you really running v5.023 + web/av enabled ?
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Why? Because it is the truth..... however I also only have at most THREE users going though it. And YES I am running all features.
Why do you guys have to be so aggresive in your replies?
[ QUOTE ] Can you tell me when Astaro are going to stop my systems whining to me daily about licensing issues and when we can stop having to custom configure our firewalls so that license counts don't skyrocket when we get portscanned?
All of which are new "features"....
[/ QUOTE ]
Just ignore anything having to do with license counts. Pretend it doesn't exist and make no assumptions. Astaro is still working on this feature and it is not fully implemented or enforced at this time.
[ QUOTE ] OfficeDefender, I've been using Astaro for a LONG time and it seems to me that the companies attitude has changed around about the initial v5 release.
[/ QUOTE ]
Their attitude has not turned sour. It's no secret that the initial v5 release was problematic and caused a lot of knuckle-chewing for all of us. The reason this occurred, however, has little to do with any incompetence in the development and QC areas and a lot more to do with pressure to meet a timetable. I'm not going to go into the specifics, but what you've got to do is consider that Astaro is a company, not some dude coding in his basement, and like most businesses they have a rather complex set of constituents to satisfy. One thing I can tell you that I've heard from Astaro -- at all levels of contact -- is that the v5 debacle will NOT be repeated.
[ QUOTE ] My personal beef is the SSL encryption being now enforced on the SMTP authentication. Yes there's a workaround, and yes a solution has been promised. However new up2dates are overwriting the recommended fix, meaningwe have to go re-edit. (Not to mention warranty being voided by having to do this).
[/ QUOTE ]
This sounds more like a feature request rather than a bugfix. Feature requests take longer to go through the development food chain, bugfixes are given much higher priority. Why can't you deal with SSL encryption for SMTP authentication? Do your users' mail clients not support it or something?
[ QUOTE ] My main beefs are that: 1) They are not responding to threads here
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This isn't an official Astaro support forum. If you have a paid license, send an email to support@astaro.com or supportus@astaro.com.
[ QUOTE ] 2) Buggy up2dates and up2dates that do not install as described in the up2date release.
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This is a rare thing.
[ QUOTE ] 3) Licensing, my original thread was never answered satisfactorily. (How often will IP's remain counted before a refresh is done).
[ QUOTE ] OfficeDefender, I've been using Astaro for a LONG time and it seems to me that the companies attitude has changed around about the initial v5 release.
[/ QUOTE ]
Their attitude has not turned sour. It's no secret that the initial v5 release was problematic and caused a lot of knuckle-chewing for all of us. The reason this occurred, however, has little to do with any incompetence in the development and QC areas and a lot more to do with pressure to meet a timetable. I'm not going to go into the specifics, but what you've got to do is consider that Astaro is a company, not some dude coding in his basement, and like most businesses they have a rather complex set of constituents to satisfy. One thing I can tell you that I've heard from Astaro -- at all levels of contact -- is that the v5 debacle will NOT be repeated.
[ QUOTE ] My personal beef is the SSL encryption being now enforced on the SMTP authentication. Yes there's a workaround, and yes a solution has been promised. However new up2dates are overwriting the recommended fix, meaningwe have to go re-edit. (Not to mention warranty being voided by having to do this).
[/ QUOTE ]
This sounds more like a feature request rather than a bugfix. Feature requests take longer to go through the development food chain, bugfixes are given much higher priority. Why can't you deal with SSL encryption for SMTP authentication? Do your users' mail clients not support it or something?
[ QUOTE ] My main beefs are that: 1) They are not responding to threads here
[/ QUOTE ]
This isn't an official Astaro support forum. If you have a paid license, send an email to support@astaro.com or supportus@astaro.com.
[ QUOTE ] 2) Buggy up2dates and up2dates that do not install as described in the up2date release.
[/ QUOTE ]
This is a rare thing.
[ QUOTE ] 3) Licensing, my original thread was never answered satisfactorily. (How often will IP's remain counted before a refresh is done).
OfficeDefender: >It's no secret that the initial v5 release was problematic and caused a lot of knuckle-chewing for all of us. The reason this occurred, however, has little to do with any incompetence in the development and QC areas and a lot more to do with pressure to meet a timetable. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yeah I'd guessed that. I've worked for a software development company for 12 years and spotted the symtoms [:)]
I just hope they recover from it soon as it seems it's been a struggle.
Pushing a software feature set release to a specific release date is all very well and good, but you should never release before a certain stability and feature point is met, if the programmers are not happy with a release, they should be listened to.
