Hello,
You have written a very thought provoking and relevant letter and I
appreciate your candor. I for one would be willing to pay for your
firewall product. The only money I've spent on anything related to Linux so
far has been the occasional purchase of a GPL CD from someplace like lsl.com
and I've been using Linux since 1994. With the production of LM Firewall, I
believe that you have found a niche product that may, if handled correctly,
provide you with a steady income from version purchases and security
upgrades. Possibly by the per server service contract you indicated.
I've tried other firewalls and they work alright if all you want is a packet
switch and NAT router. I very much appreciate the extensibility of your
product. For example, I've put SAMBA on the firewall and replaced my other
full distro (LM 7.2) server for my home LAN. Support of ReiserFS is greatly
appreciated as I have been running it since 7.2 came out. I don't want more
than one machine laying around plugged into the wall doing nothing more than
creating heat so a floppy firewall product is not for me. I also added
Portsentry and am quite happy.
Remote manageability and monitoring could be extended to include the full
functionality of webmin and netsaint but I could just as easily set those up
myself. There appears to be little if any indication of the existence of LM
Firewall judging by your website, so if you want people to pay for a
product/service, you need to let people know that it exists even if it's
nothing more than link from your homepage.to a product feature page.
One more small item before I finish; Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't
find a way using your web manager to allow all (or filter) traffic on the
internal network. It will allow filtering of IN -> OUT and OUT -> IN but
not just on the Internal interface. I had to manually (via ssh) Insert an
ipchains rule in the INPUT chain similar to the following ( ipchains -I
input -b -i eth0 -j ACCEPT ). I know it probably looks dumb but I'm not a
programmer so I hack at rules. That took care of opening the firewall for my
LAN to pass SAMBA traffic, for instance.
Anyway, great and useful product. Keep up the good work and everyone will
benefit.
Sincerely,
Trent M. Gunnarson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Miguel (and others),
>
> Distro will be out very soon (less than one month), and I'm curious to
> hear answer to one question from you and other raders of this list: money.
>
> That is, what would you (or your customers) like to get from us (related
> to MandrakeSecurity), and how much are you willing to pay for it?
>
> I'm asking this question because of one really unpleasant detail: if
> everyone simply downloads the distribution, and we don't earn on it, I bet
> the distribution will eventually end up in trash can, and you will end up
> with unsupported (== no more security updates! == useless) distribution on
> your firewall. ;-)
>
> So: how much is your security worth to you, and what do you expect to have
> from Mandrakesoft in return? In my opinion, best thing to do would be some
> kind of long-term commitment from both sides, like:
>
> Customer: monthly fee of X$/server during next Y months (years).
> Mandrakesoft: commitment to do (whatever) during the same period.
>
> WDYT?
> Denis
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Dr. Denis Havlik http://MandrakeForum.com
> Mandrakesoft ||| e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Community (@ @) (private: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
> ------------------oOO--(_)--OOo---------------------
> The mailserver is on strike. It wants better working conditions,
> paid days off and a female connector. ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
>
>
>
