Since you all were nice enough to let me use your product at home for free... I feel like I owe you some feedback. I installed yesterday so mostly install/setup feedback.
Me: Non IT guy but an Engineer so I know enough about IT stuff to be dangerous.
Network: Broadband FTTH install being routed by a Linksys router running Tomato on 192.168.0.1 (opted to keep that router active so if I need to fallback to a non UTP setup it will only take a couple minutes). VMWare ESXi infrastructure for virtualized file and domain services. Numerous endpoints, wired and wireless - primarily Windows 7 and 8 but also OSX, iOS, network appliances (printer, storage...), gaming systems, other mobile...
Alternatives: I was actually looking at one of the inexpensive sonicwall appliances when I stumbled on some very positive reviews of Sophos... when I found that you had a vmware appliance I decided to give you a try. For reference... the Sonicwall was going to cost me about $500 to buy and a couple hundred a year to subscribe. The maintenance cost was a lot for a home network so I was balking.
I downloaded your software iso and installed it to one of my esxi hosts. Provisioning and installation took... MAYBE 15 minutes at which point I was at the Web interface (VERY good for a vmware clean install) and the setup was straightforward enough that I got it right the first time.
Reconfigured the physical network using second gige port on esxi host as dedicated connection to router & WAN, switched Linksys router to 192.168.1.1, intranet adapter on UTP VM to 192.168.0.1 (domain default gateway), WAN adapter to 192.168.1.2, no change in domain DHCP config required - that maybe took another 10 minutes.
At that point I tried to connect... and got no DNS resolution. Looked online (somehow missed that you have a bunch of videos) and read that I needed to create a Firewall rule. Created rule... no change. Looked through admin pages and found empty routing table... created static route... no change.
Spent a couple hours mucking about with a number of different settings and I could NOT get to the internet from internal systems no matter what I tried, though I could get to the linksys router (still not exactly sure why).
At that point I noticed the small and innocuous 'enable' button on the various rules... and that it was not clicked. Clicked that button in a few places and all of a sudden things started working (imagine that). I think I could have gotten up and running in less than an hour if I'd noticed that in the first place.
So overall... very easy to configure and provides great feedback regarding network activity and health. Now I'm thinking that I will go through the single sign on configuration and maybe even endpoint security. Great product!
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