[Info-vax] vtAlpha and marketing bullshit

[ChrisQ]

On 12/20/11 16:39, Paul Sture wrote:

>
> That reminds me of a firewall solution done by Red Hat(?) about 10 years
> ago.  Boot off a CD, put your config files on a write locked floppy, and
> it all ran out of RAM.  I seriously thought about getting it until I saw
> the price (1,000 USD IIRC).
>
> While I have since learnt that a dedicated hardware solution is better
> for a firewall, the principal idea is not forgotten.
>

There are quite a few free firewall solutions around. First used Freesco
around 6 years ago, which boots from floppy. You need to get to grips
with low level iptables stuff, which isn't so convenient if you are making
frequent changes to the config. Later examples, such as Ipcop and pfsense
provide gui form based setup via the the local lan, which is much more 
convenient.

Currently having a look at fw builder, which is a Linux / solaris gui 
based tool.
This compiles user entered data down to iptables, which you then copy onto
the target hardware. None of the above mentioned free stuff will run on 
sparc
and really would like to have the firewall running on non intel 
architecture
for improved security. It's fun learning about this stuff as well...

Regards,

Chris