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
[ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] I have to totally diasgree with you OD..ASL may be ISCA 4 certified and that's all well and good but right now for many users the software while secure is so unstable it is unsusable. Astaro needs to fix the codebase(i have been saying this for a looooooooooooooooooong time) and get it stable before releasing new features. No Astaro bashing..just the facts.
[/ QUOTE ]
If it is so "unstable", then why is it running just fine at every single site our company manages? We're talking lots and lots of sites, all of which I either manage myself or oversee the management of. And then there are the locations we do consulting for, those are running just fine on v5 as well -- if they weren't, I'd have a bunch of network techs barking at me on a daily basis. Yes, there are issues, but they aren't show-stoppers, just inconveniences that have to be worked around until the fixes are out. There were some serious problems with the early releases of version 5, but those are gone.
As far as the decision by Astaro to push out the new feature in the 5.025 release, the assumptions being made in this thread are completely wrong. Astaro runs its releases on a schedule, and the new feature in 5.025 was mapped out a long time ago and has been in QA testing for some time. The new feature in 5.025 is NOT an indication that Astaro isn't fixing the current issues -- they don't drop the ball while they work on a new feature, they have a team of developers working on various things. Astaro is a company, not a couple of guys in a basement hacking out code. The assumptions being made in this thread are simply ridiculous.
-Steve
[/ 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 rpboems. 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.
[ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] I have to totally diasgree with you OD..ASL may be ISCA 4 certified and that's all well and good but right now for many users the software while secure is so unstable it is unsusable. Astaro needs to fix the codebase(i have been saying this for a looooooooooooooooooong time) and get it stable before releasing new features. No Astaro bashing..just the facts.
[/ QUOTE ]
If it is so "unstable", then why is it running just fine at every single site our company manages? We're talking lots and lots of sites, all of which I either manage myself or oversee the management of. And then there are the locations we do consulting for, those are running just fine on v5 as well -- if they weren't, I'd have a bunch of network techs barking at me on a daily basis. Yes, there are issues, but they aren't show-stoppers, just inconveniences that have to be worked around until the fixes are out. There were some serious problems with the early releases of version 5, but those are gone.
As far as the decision by Astaro to push out the new feature in the 5.025 release, the assumptions being made in this thread are completely wrong. Astaro runs its releases on a schedule, and the new feature in 5.025 was mapped out a long time ago and has been in QA testing for some time. The new feature in 5.025 is NOT an indication that Astaro isn't fixing the current issues -- they don't drop the ball while they work on a new feature, they have a team of developers working on various things. Astaro is a company, not a couple of guys in a basement hacking out code. The assumptions being made in this thread are simply ridiculous.
-Steve
[/ 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. Things have improved..but much more needs to be done.
[ 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.
[/ QUOTE ]
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.
[/ QUOTE ]
'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
[/ QUOTE ]
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..
[/ QUOTE ]
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?
