Firewall Wizards: fw-wiz] Sonicwall or Watchguard

[Daniel Feenberg <feenberg () nber org>]

Andy Murrell writes...

> I can speak from experience that the sonicwall when doing its job it
> works GREAT!. One of the downsides of the SonicWall seems to be that
> when there is a power outage sonicwall will drop its config. You then
> have to reconfigure the sonicwall.
I think your Sonicwall must be broken. We have two (a DMZ and an XPRS2)
and both keep their setup just fine through a power outage. They do
lose track of current sessions, so that telnet, ftp and ssh users have
to login again, but I believe that is to be expected.

Our only complaint about the DMZ was that untill a recent firmware
upgrade it had a tendency to lock up once a month or so apparently due
to a "multicast bug". A power cycle restored it to life (with no lose
of setup).

The XPRS2 (the recent purchase) claims to support standard syslog, but
we haven't tried that. 

> From our perspective the advantage of the Sonicwall is ease of use in a
setting with only one firewall, and no moving parts (fan or disk). Of
course the GUI would be painfull if you had a large number of these to
maintain and the Sonicwall group/remote maintainence feature is
proprietary.

There is a sonicwall mailing list maintained by yahoogroups.com. Most all
of the traffic is from users having trouble setting up VPNs, however. The
core firewall functions do not seem to give many users difficulty.


Daniel Feenberg
feenberg () nber org



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