Sonicwall soho3

[cyberskye]

Started out on a Linky-4port a few years back.

Bumped up to the nexland about a year ago - had 5 machines pumping thru the poor little linky and it was crawling. Ordered the isb soho and they sent me the pro400 same price.

Yesterday in the mail I received this lovely little device. It currently sits between my public servers and my LAN. Advertised 75M bidirectional - I have personally clocked it over 60 transfering whole albums in mp3 format.

These list on the dell website for over $600. I got it at pagecomputers for under $400 - get them whilst they are hot!

I can't talk about it anymore right now - a little too emotional.

Skye

[YeOldeStonecat]

Originally posted by cyberskye
I can't talk about it anymore right now - a little too emotional.

Skye

LOL....I know what you mean. Sometimes I just stare at hot new hardware, with a warm tear in my eye, heart going "pitter patter".

LOL ! !

[zxc47]

Give us a link ?

[cyberskye]

http://www.sonicwall.com/products/soho/index.html - mine is the soho3. The place I found them cheap is http://www.pagecomputers.com

I wanted a certified stateful firewall - thought that might not be able to keep up with the nexland due to overhead....NOT! Plus has hardware vpn...

I spend half my time at our HQ in SF and half at home in DC and have been dying to have a secure way to "stay home" even when away...just didn't feel comfortable with a single perimeter defense. Now that I have layers (defense in depth, baby!) I feel much more comfortable doing so.

Skye

Edit: YOSC - have you worked with these? The performance is very impressive, but the web interface is equally so. I thought that nexland was the only camp that could put both in the same product :)

[YeOldeStonecat]

Originally posted by cyberskye

Edit: YOSC - have you worked with these? The performance is very impressive, but the web interface is equally so. I thought that nexland was the only camp that could put both in the same product :)

No I haven't yet, around 2 years ago, almost did, quoted one for a client...wanted to.

Compared to the Nexland, I'd expect Sonics to be above it, more enterprise, as their a much higher end unit. I always state the Nexland as fastest...of the home market routers, with the Pro's being aimed towards smaller office. It's probably even above the Symantec Gateway/VPN appliance I have here at the office, which is based on the Nexland....with a few stronger VPN features.

133 mHz CPU and 16 megs....she should fly!

Enjoy!

[twwabw]

SonicWalls are incredible pieces of equipment. I have set up several networks that use them. The performance is superb, as is the SPI firewall capability. The user interface is by far the easiest to work with of any I've seen.

These sites use the Pro-VX at the Main office (same as current Pro300), and then SOHO's or TELE's at the remote home user's offices. The Pro-VX uses a 233 mhz processor, w/16mb ram and 4 mb flash memory. It supports up to 1,000 VPN tunnels, and over 100,000 simultaneous connections!! It's very simple to set up SA's to the devices, and the VPN is seamless and invisible to the users. Their software client works well too.

I have the content filter list set up as well, filtering all web content at the office. There is now bandwidth control, and redundancy built in with the new firmware. The logging capabilties of access and intrusion are great- I also use the ViewPoint reporting tool, and Global Management system too.

Also check out the new TELE3-TZ, which has two independent "zones", for home users that have other networked PC's that they want to keep off the VPN.

[cyberskye]

I don't think I was ready to throw down that kind of money for my home rig...but we can dream!

How is the viewpoint package? It doesn't come standard with my model. Can you customize the reports or are they all canned? Can you export them to xml (or another format) or can you only view them through the web interface?

[twwabw]

Viewpoint is OK.... but that's it. Yes- they're canned reports. Nowhere near the info. you can get from say, a Proxy server log. My biggest annoyance is no times reported for user activty- only general for the day. But, its effect on users is amazing :D . They don't know that I don't have every detail, and I imply that I do. There's enough daily info. there specific to their own activity to really open their eyes. And that's what management wants.

ViewPoint was included with the VX's- that's why I use it. If I had to pay for it- I'd buy WebTrends instead.

You can use the log data dynamically with whatever logging S/W you'd like. In fact, the latest firmware allows exporting to 2 different syslog servers. I've installed daemons for some other logging software and tried them They literally are too detailed. But- you can do it.

You can always download the log files as text files, and import and manipulate/query the data any way you'd like.