Firewalls

[jdaniel]

Does anyone have experience with small office firewall products that they would care to share? I am looking at SonicWall, NetScreen, and the GTA (GnatBox and GB1000) offerings.
I am familiar with some of the "big" products, but I'm not interested in running another PIX, Proxy/ISA or Checkpoint device if I can avoid it.
Thanks


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Jack Daniel, MCSE+I, CCNA

[warr_wiz]

Jack, we use SonicWall here and have had no problems. The installation and configuration was done by an outside company so I'm not surer about the particulars. But it was the firewall they use for most of their accounts. (one of the techs is a personal friend so it wasn't just a sales pitch)

[Matt Parsons]

Jack, we have an offering called DealerPath that includes the following features: Integration with any dealership IT environment, Firewall Security, Email and Internet Access, Secure remote Access using VPN capabilities, supports dial-up and broadband connection types, installation and support by EDS.

DealerPath is what I like to call Internet in a Box. We sell this as a service to dealers for as low as $2995 one-time for a 24 month contract or $175 per month for a 24 month contract with a $325 activation fee.

If you would like more details on DealerPath, email me and I will send you more detailed information or visit or website at www.edsarg.com.

Matt

[dantana]

We've used the NetScreen products and they have worked well - very little (if any) issues. If you have a small office, you're probably OK with the NetScreen 5 version; we recently upgraded to a larger-capacity version, as we filter our web traffic in-house with it.

[aksales]

Jack,
Hey, this is Jason from Alaska Sales and Service, in Anchorage Alaska. I wanted to throw my $.02 in here on this one. We currently use the eSoft Instagate EX2 for our net accessibility. This is the same thing that EDS is offering in the Dealerpath package. For our setup it works pretty good. Although I would like to mention that if you deal with Instagate themselves prepare for less then stellar response time, and redundant tech support calls. I imagine that we probably would have gotten better tech support if we purchased the setup through EDS.
Now we also have some Sonicwall SOHO2 boxes setup for our VPN to our second location. If this is something you are interested in, take note that we are still having connection problems between the locations, and I have not been able to rule out the Sonicwall for blame. As for the Sonicwall, the tech support seems decent (excluding the above-mentioned problem), and generally issues are fixed quickly.


Hope this has helped you in some way.

[Hawk]

I know you mentioned you are not interested in proxy, but we have set up a proxy server using WinProxy from Ositis. The reason I like it is because I have virtually no problems with it. I run it on a dedicated Pentium II 266 mhz, which you can pick up cheap. ALSO, I like that I have site-filtering AND anti-virus for every PC at a reasonable price. We have not had a virus break into us ever. The only negative is that I cannot get Real Player to work through the proxy server. Windows Media Player works fine, though. Just MY 2 cents. Have a great day.

Tom Hawkins

[jdaniel]

Great feedback, thanks to all. I'll start researching the products you have suggested.

Jack

[MichaelM]

We are a VW-Audi-Mazda-Porsche Dealer and with all those franchises we need something easy and flexible. We have 18 PCs on LAN that share one connection. We use a NetGear RO318 Firewall Router. It is inexpensive (<$200.00) and easy to use. It has web traffic logging that can be emailed as a report, some filtering and a browser based interface. It has worked very well for our purposes and our local ISP help set it up for free. If others know of any pitfalls of this solution please let me know.

[LJMiller]

If you are looking at Firewall Security options, there are a couple of resources that can also assist you in determining what you might need. There is an article in the February AutoExec on Security:Building Firewalls that provides some good basic information and there is also a section on Dealership Security including firewalls in the Olympus document, the Dealership Infrastructure Guidelines put out by Daimler Chrysler, Ford Motor Company and General Motors. If you need a copy of this document, you can download a copy from most of the OEM's or EDS has it available on their dealer download site at www.edsarg.com.