Firewall Wizards: Re: External Load Balancing

[Mark Teicher <mht3 () earthlink net>]

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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> firewall-wizards mailing list
> firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com
> http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
_______________________________________________
firewall-wizards mailing list
firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com
http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards