[lug] Anyone interested in beta testing our stuff?

[Nate Duehr]

On Dec 3, 2004, at 5:07 PM, Brad Doctor wrote:

> My company Stillsecure is doing a beta program of our IDS/IPS product 
> called
> Border Guard.  This is a "software appliance" that is based on Linux
> (kernel 2.6) and the program is open to any and all.  If you are 
> interested,
> what you will need to do is go to stillsecure.org and sign up for a 
> download
> (we won't sell your information and nobody will call or email).  We 
> have some
> forums at the website for questions/problems suggestions.

Hi Brad.

A friend at work is very excited about your product/project.  He's been 
playing with it all of last week, but he's never built a Linux 
firewall/IDS before -- yours was the first one he ran across via a 
recommendation of a friend.  (He knows someone involved with your 
company -- what that connection is, I don't know.)  He's been trying to 
get me to play with it all week.

I did a lot of "looking over his shoulder" and concluded that it looked 
a lot like the commercial versions of a number of other players in the 
"pop a CD in and create a Linux firewall" market.  Could you describe 
how your system is better than those?  Specifically I was thinking 
about SmoothWall and IPCop which I've talked about here on the list 
before.  Astero (is that the right name? Antero?) is probably another 
example.

I think technically it looks "good" but no different than many others 
out there.  Marketing/sales-wise, the website is snazzy and people do 
like pretty websites!  (GRIN)

Obviously this crowd here is probably a bit more "do-it-yourself" than 
most, but we've all talked about the Linux firewall discs before.  Any 
thoughts on why someone would go with a customized distro like this 
over DIY?  I can say here that I currently have a SmoothWall running 
but not always 100% happy with it... they rarely if ever update their 
snort ruleset.  It was mostly out of "I need to get this done and I'm 
going to be lazy and use this thing here at my house" and also that a 
friend and I were playing with the built-in IPSec VPN support which was 
rediculously easy to set up, considering all we had to do punch in our 
public IP we wanted to use on each end, and a common passphrase.  Then 
we annoyed each other by printing to each other's laser printers for a 
few weeks and tore the whole thing down.  ;-)

I do wish you guys well with it... all the companies I've worked for 
wanted a "big name" behind their firewall and bought the iron to go 
with it... Cisco PIX, Checkpoint FW-1 running on the custom Nokia PC's 
with their hacked up BSD flavor on them, etc.  Small businesses I've 
talked to or helped with other non-security work are running  SOHO 
devices like the Linksys "firewalls" for their stuff and host-based 
firewalls on top of that.

As a geek who appreciates how much more useful a Linux-based firewall 
device can be, I still have found it a hard sell to get any of the 
small biz'es I've helped out over the years to dedicate a box to the 
job.  It's just seen as "something else I have to buy" no matter how 
cheap you make it for them.  If you provide the box, you end up having 
to offer some kind of warranty on the box itself.  Not something most 
small biz consultants really want to deal with.  Thus, products like 
the RADWare and other embedded solutions end up looking better to meet 
both side's needs.  I could see someone taking your product and 
offering it on say something like the Via mini-ITX boards with 
dual-NIC's, in a very small case.  Maybe even in something like the 
Mini-Box M100 ( 
http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.12/it.A/id.332/.f ) if 
they'd move on to the newer mini-itx boards with two NIC's on them.  
Could customize the LCD to show firewall stats, nicely, and use the 
front-panel buttons to ease the setup of the system.

Putting a commercially supported Linux-firewall CD in the drive and 
using one of them like yours is a technical no-brainer -- it's a good 
way to go instead of a DIY iptables setup if you're building it for 
someone else.  But, I haven't seen many small biz owners who wouldn't 
go for an embedded solution over an additional PC.

You guys have great reviews out there on the Net about your commercial 
and now Free products.  I hope you do well.  Just some thoughts and 
opinions from a curmudgeon...

--
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com