I am new to Sophos UTM. I installed it a week or so ago while I was evaluating other free or open source firewall offerings. I recently decided to retire my ASA5505 at home and was interested in trying some virtual appliances. I've worked in IT for about 18 years now, and I enjoy having an extensive home lab. I picked up an ASA5505 for home use about six years ago to aid my ASA learning path. It has served me well, but it's getting old (100 Mbps only interfaces), and the base license can be somewhat restricting. So, I decided to move it out of service and use it strictly for labbing. I decided to check out virtual offerings as I had just added a new server to my lab to use for esx with plenty of resources (Dell R710 with 12 cores/24 threads, 144 GB RAM and 2 TB of SSD, and 8 physical nics, and idrac).
I kicked the tires on a small handful. At work we use ASA and Juniper, but getting a perpetual license for a virtual version of either of those is beyond my budget. Besides, there are plenty of other exciting options available. It really came down to Untangle or Sophos. I thought I was going to settle with Untangle. I even paid for a $50 annual subscription. But then I took Sophos UTM for a whirl. There were some small hurdles within the first week. Mostly around remote access vpns. I tried to get the ipsec client to work which was not hard, but I ran into an odd situation where if I tried to rdp my laptop over the tunnel from work, my cable modem would crash (I'm not kidding). So, then I tried the Cisco VPN client. It would connect and bring up a tunnel, but could not pass any traffic along. Then I tried the ssl option. Pretty impressive. It's basically a re-branded OpenVPN if I'm not mistaken, but it works great.
Now that I have everything setup how I want it, I'm very impressed. I find the whole experience to be quite slick. Setting up firewall rules is simple and pretty straight forward. I love that it supports dynamic routing. I have quite a few routers and subnets in my home lab, so having ospf support makes me happy. The dashboard is great. Logging is fantastic. I think this is one of the areas where this really shines vs other free options. I could go on and on, but this is already TLDR.
Just wanted to say that I'm very thankful that this product is made available for home use at no charge.
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