~Toughbooktalk~

Thank you for your vote pp999.

Okay, I will close this thread at 5PM CST on Monday 9/26.

Let's take the rest of this week and all weekend to continue voting as such!

Thanks guys!!!

Rob you know more about this stuff than I do so if this is something that will make TBT even stronger then go for it.

Hmm, from what I can see, most downtimes seem to be caused by phpbb upgrades, not by firewall issues.
So, my recommendation would be to setup a pre-production VM for fiddling around with stuff prior to production deployment.

No requirements for firewall featureset have been posted, so its kinda hard to give any advice here.
Some cheap 19" atom d525 box with pfsense? (dual-core with 256bit AES accelerator)
Or some Ubiquity Edgerouter? (estimate 20% of marketing throughput - aka buy 5x larger than stated)
sophos utm (formerly astaro security linux) offers hardware appliances and also a free non-commercial iso for up to 50 ips.

I personally try to stay away from cisco, netgear, zyxel and similar dinosaurs for firewalling - mostly due to lack of firmware updates.
cisco router-/switch-only models are fine though, especially if one has to burn some venture capital.

just my 2 cents

I have had GREAT sucess with ZyXEL... As a matter of fact, Netgear has gone off the deep end so much that I refuse to use them... I have the old SRX5308 still in the racks which has 936MB throuput but there is NO CHANCE I'm going back to it.

Even with the discontinued model I have I've had NUMEROUS tech support calls to them for no cost (little things I'm verifying more than anything) and they are VERY helpful and smart and aren't positioned in India! Firmware also has never been a problem! Cisco is too much $$$

Hi Rob,
glad to hear that zyxel is working out for you.

The intention behind my previous post was not to bash zyxel,
but to point out that keeping the old, slow firewall while investing (mostly time)
into a pre-production environment might be an even better / more impactful choice for this site.
I'm a consultant by trade, so I can't help being a weisenheimer


We can agree that netgear is mostly
BTW, security track records of: zyxel / pfsense / cisco ios / netgear / sophos utm (fka astaro)

I see I missed a lot while I was gone just about a week on tow moving the rig from Suriname to Trinidad.

I am glad to see we can get by on the old firewall for now if needed.

But I also know we need to plan for the future, that includes maxing out on the new line and also newer product that I would hope (not up on the latest firewalls) have newer upgrades, block newer threats and support if needed.


I say we do it. We can start sales and donations for it, but we don't have to have it all at once since we can get by on the old firewall for now. When I finally get the next paycheck in. (they have me swapped on a once a month pay now) I will be sending some your way.

Thanks for the information Karl and ADOR!

Okay guys!

I forgot to close this thread lol. Big surprise there.

At any rate, instead of opening a new thread I will just keep this open and I will post the donation results.

Here is what we have so far:

$50 - $1.75 fee = $48.25
$50 - $1.75 fee = $48.25
$50 - $1.75 fee = $48.25
$50 - $1.75 fee = $48.25
TOTAL SO FAR: $193

Thanks!

EDITED 9/28/16 10:47AM CST

I vote new firewall, and I'll kick over a donation next week on payday.

FYI site was down for about three hours yesterday:
Fatal error: Namespace declaration statement has to be the very first statement in the script in F:\Websites\toughbooktalk.com\phpbb\passwords\driver\phpass.php on line 14

What was that all about?