hardware firewall buying

Skywise · 2006-10-29T21:20:30+00:00

I'm in the market for a hardware router/firewall device as Iam FINALLY moving to broadband... cable to be precise.I've looked at a few models from both Linksys and D-link. Ialso took a gander at some websites that have customer reviewsto get an idea on what models have/don't have problems. Theproblem is that most of what I read are complaints, no matterwhat model I'm looking at.I've also tried a few review websites but they didn't seem offerme much information beyond what's in the manufacturers brochures.I'm kind of fond of the Linksys BEFSX41.Can anyone offer some comments that might help my decisionmaking process?What I'd love to find is a website that does reviews andcomparisons like does for digital cameras. Theyare extremely in depth and have a search matrix to help youdecide what models meet your requirements.Brian

Oct 29, 2006 65 Replies

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Anders Arnholm 19 years ago

Leythos skriver:

That doesn't make sence, tio make the big high-capasity stuff is as cheep as making the slow box. (Or actually cheeper.) But as they think they can get more money from the big custumers that actually need the moset they add functionality to lower the performace.

If they then can get the Z level product for the price of thet Y level, (with addiotnal software making it slower) one can easily think thet the version with out the cripple software should have been even cheeper to sell in the first place. To me a manifaturer that put development cost into makeing the product work slower, with less performace feels realy bad. I rather see that they put the work into makeing it work faster.

Or the alöternative, you got the product from start with the best perfomance and payed the lower price, you would have been even happier.

/ Balp

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Leythos 19 years ago

The point is they provide a product at different levels, with different levels of performance, so that customers can purchase the level they need - this means that they can recover costs of development easier, but over a longer period, while still making the product viable to people that could not afford it otherwise.

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Greg Hennessy 19 years ago

ROTFL! Au contraire, Oh I understand alright.

Watchguard products are *not* certified today, therefore by your assessment they cannot possibly be firewalls period.

Prior 'certification' is meaningless and the claim it would be in breach of ICSALabs small print.

and you are advocating *not* updating watchguard products with critical bugfixes in order to 'comply' with an out of date meaningless test.

Have you told your customers that Watchguard products are unmaintainable ?

How much are you taking in support from customers whose watchguard products you're refusing to patch.

If you have patched their watchguard products, have you told them, that the enforcement points are not a real firewalls any more ?

greg

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Anders Arnholm 19 years ago

Leythos skriver:

The point is that they dor addional work to make it cheeper. The cheeper version has more deveploment costs, the same hardware cost as the full version. The additional feature added is an limitation of what speed, number of simultainius conections and so on. I can't understand the logic behind it. The only reason is to fit into some market analyst idea of what customers need for speed.

Personally this kind of behaivour, keeps me recomending cheep open source solutions for constomers that doesn't need anything very special. That whay you can be sure that no-one added cripple functionality to your software.

The funny thing is that the more "advancde" in terms of software/hardware complexity is the cheepes, the less ciomplex version costs more.

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Leythos 19 years ago

I fully understand you position, but, since it costs less to maintain the product, to develop new functionality, to test, to maintain security, since the platform is the same, it would seem to me that this is a good idea and a good way to ensure that a quality solution hits the market and reasonable prices.

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