A majority of vendors who build appliances build it for one reason. They
do not have to hire a bunch of highly skilled technical people for customer
support. Provide a nice color glossy diagram with lots of circle and
arrows, and the customer(s) are enjoying their appliance purchase, not
unlike the early days of firewalls, where most companies stated: "Oh yeah
our stuff works on that variant of Unix or Windows" But in reality, one
needed a Phd to configure the underlying O/S just the right way before the
firewall application could be installed, all this with technical support on
the phone or on site.
/mht
At 07:40 PM 1/9/2005, Marcus J. Ranum wrote:
>Kevin wrote:
> >One advantage of the Radware products is that they are true
> >appliances
>
>Appliance, schmaiance!
>
>What's in an appliance? Software.
>What's in a Windows box? Software.
>What's in a Linux box? Software.
>What's in a Cisco box? Software.
>
>"Appliance" is just a frozen configuration of a software/hardware
>combination. Sometimes it's a good configuration of good
>software. Sometimes it's not. I saw one "appliance" that had a
>back-door telnetd on a "hidden" (who'd ever think to look for telnetd
>on port 1823?!!) port. Geniuses build appliances. Idiots build
>appliances. Your mileage may vary.
>
>But if you just assume "appliance == goodness" then you've
>been drinking too much marketing kool-ade.
>
>mjr.
>
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Received on Jan 12 2005
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