From your answer I take it that Astaro solutions do not work on Windows machines at all. Where I have all Windows network I assume that all machines on that network might possibly utilise a Linux machine in an Internet Connection Sharing mode with the existing Windows networked machines. In other words all Internet traffic would pass through the Linux machine to the existing network. Possible?
Yes, the Astaro solutions are standalone devices. And the typical setup is to plug the firewall into the internet and the local area network and have all devices on the LAN share the internet connection.
The types of devices you plug in behind the firewall does not matter, just as long as they use a standard TCP/IP stack.
Lorlas,
sorry I misunderstood your question. I made the same mistake myself when was applying for a licence.
ASL Astaro is a standalone application eg it runs on its own hardware at least for us simple home users it does.
Basically any old PC, PIII 600 with 512mb, 2 lan cards and at least 10gb (preferably more usually means a more modern disk) of disk and you can run v6.3x without a problem. If you want to use some of the proxies and the other user management features I recommend at least 768mb of ram. On a slow machine it reduces the swap usage a little bit.
Can Astaro software and/or hardware be used with Windows?
Certainly. Most installations using an Astaro firewall have Microsoft Windows running on their workstations. Also, with the LDAP and RADIUS connectivity features buildt into Astaro, you can integrate the firewall seamlessly into a Microsoft server based Active Directory domain.
Just keep in mind that the Astaro Security Gateway software does not run on a Microsoft Windows machine, the way Zone Alarm and other software based firewalls do. ASG is Linux based enterprise grade firewall software system that requires a dedicated machine of its own. The PC used for this should have a minimum of 256 MB RAM (preferably 512 MB), a minimum of a 10 GB hard drive, a 500 MHz P3 CPU, and at least two Ethernet interfaces.
However I do have one friend who has installed VMWare on his laptop, and is running Astaro and Windows on the same laptop as VMWare sessions. He uses the Astaro firewall instead of the Windows firewall to handle security on the machine. I have not tried it, but he swears it works great.
