Ben Nagy said:
#Can Sidewinder be considered for "general purpose" installs with its rep
for
#price / complexity?
Sidewinder is definitely a complex product but a good firewall admin should
be able to handle a complex product. One of the things that I really like
about the Sidewinder is the configurability which is one of the reasons for
the complexity. I'm not sure of exactly what you mean by "general
purpose"? In my opinion 99% of the Sidewinders running in production are
general purpose installs. I would probably recommend going with an simpler
product if you don't need the security the Sidewinder provides.
I didn't think Sidewinder was any more expensive than Firewall-1. The base
prices are as follows in US dollars:
Unlimited User License - $17,495
250 User License - $7,497
100 User License - $4,995
25 User Lincense - $2,495
You have to buy a server yourself. The top of the line Compaq DL380 runs
about $14,000 with 1gig ram, dual 933mhz procesors, raid, 64-bit network
cards, ect.
Cristopher Byrne said:
#3. Sidewinder - seems to be fair technically but a real pain in the butt
to
#install and configure for anything but the simplest configurations. Poor
#interoperability with third party. Good technical information available,
#however not enough of it, and not enough sources to get it from (i.e. not
#enough support engineers, resellers etc...)
They have definitely improved in a lot of areas with Sidewinder V5.1.
There is more interoperability with third party products like e-mail
filtering. I wouldn't bother going to a reseller for support. Most of
them do not push enough of the Sidewinder product to learn it well. It
just isn't cost effective for them.
Richard Reiner said:
#3/ SideWinder is desirable primarily for its compartmentalization-based
#implementation, but I am wary of such a closed single-vendor approach
#to OS security.
The only closed part of the Sidewinder is the Type Enforcement code. All
of the rest of the code in the box is from BSDi or open source products. I
don't really see how it is any more closed or single vendor than
Firewall-1, PIX, or any of the other commercial firewalls. Last I heard
Secure Computing intends to get all of its products including Sidewinder
running on Linux which would open up Type Enforcement to the open source
community due to Linux licensing.
Regards,
Jeffery Gieser
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