I’ve had a little bit of activity on my personal blog in response to this post so I thought I’d post it here where I can elaborate a little more. I try not to get too techy there. That’s what this site is for. I’m currently working through a Linux course. I want to become more proficient in Linux. I think it’s a fantastic OS and I’m very supportive of open source software. I know I haven’t updated this site in awhile but since my last update, I have resigned from the tech company for which I was working as a contractor. So now I’m only working my full-time office job which is unrelated to tech. I’m kinda the “tech dept” here where I work though.

I haven’t worked on my Linux course in a couple weeks. I’ve had plenty of things keeping me busy. I do plan on getting back into it though. I’m also hoping to find time soon to switch my security gateway or UTM (unified threat management), which ever you wanna call it. Currently I use Untangle and I want to switch to Astaro.

Untangle is great, I’m not saying I’m unhappy with it. I uses many of it’s great features. It’s open source and free for anyone to use. I’ve been glad to have it. I run this computer without any anti-virus (yeah, I use windows…don’t hate) and I’ve never had to worry. I run frequent virus scans just to see how things are going and I must say I’ve had no problems. I also use the VPN, powered by OpenVPN, to connect my office computer to my home network and access my FreeNAS server. I also use that in order to backup my server daily to a hard drive at my office and to back up extremely important work files to my home servers as well. That way I always have 2 copies of every file and both copies are at different locations. So if my house burns down, I still have my pictures and other stuff. If my office gets burglarized, I have my client files backed up. Ok I won’t preach at you about the importance of backup files.

Astaro uses open source and non-open source software so it’s not free for commercial use. Astaro is free for home users though. Home users have to install it on their own hardware (which you also must do with Untangle). I’m not changing because I think Astaro is better, not at all. I’m changing to check out Astaro. The guys I know who have used it, swear by it.

So what’s the point? I’ve used a gateway security device for several months now at home and on the network at my office. It has many benefits for all users. First, all of your data coming into your network gets scanned before it reaches any of your computers. Think of it like a bouncer at a club. The bouncer keeps all the riffraff from even getting into the club, which will (in theory) make the club safer. So you save yourself from having to clean off viruses and malware if they can’t even reach your system. By scanning data at the entrance to your network, you don’t have to scan it when it gets to your computer. This frees up memory on your computer and helps it to run faster.

Another benefit is total network filtering. This is very beneficial for families with kids, schools and work environments. You can block the whole network from getting to “dirty sites” or non-work related sites, specific sites, certain categories etc. Since the filtering occurs at the entrance to the network, there is no software running on the individual machine that can be disabled by the user. Also you have the benefit of better performance, again, since you don’t have extra software running on your workstations.

As I stated earlier, I have Untangle running at my office now. It’s completely free for us to use. I’ve installed it on a refurbished Dell box. It currently supports 9 workstations and one Windows server. I’ve been very pleased with it’s performance. My office manager doesn’t care about site filters, except for the dirty stuff. They don’t mind us playing games or going to Facebook when we aren’t busy. I run a light anti-virus client on each machine just to protect against something coming from inside our network. For example, if one of our employees has a usb key which they have brought from home, it’s very likely that they could have picked up a virus from a home computer. A gateway device can’t do anything about that. I can’t lockdown everyone’s usb ports or cd/dvd drives either because we need them. So in that case, they still have to have some local protection. We’ll probably stick to Untangle here because well, it doesn’t cost anything. Of course, Untangle has several add-on features that do cost money, but none we need at the moment.

Well I’ll leave this discussion here. Feel free to comment, add your own thoughts or experiences. I’ll write some more about this once I’ve implemented Astaro.