On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 06:53, Lenny <[email protected]> wrote:
> OpenBSD scares me a bit:)

It shouldn't, really.  The initial installer dialog is awful, but once
you get past it and get stuff running, it's about as smooth and
seamless as any good BSD setup.  For that matter, neither pf nor
iptables should be scary.  Like OpenBSD, they both start looking
difficult but if you actually take the time to sit down and work with
them you'll usually find that they "just work" the way a network admin
thinks they should.  Too often toolkits wrapped around them end up
making them more complex than they really need to be.  Don't know if
pf has a similarly verbose set of documentation, but this
[http://iptables-tutorial.frozentux.net/iptables-tutorial.html] piece
for iptables was immensely useful for pushing me over the edge from
being an iptables user to understanding iptables.

> Regarding the iptables stuff, weird as it may sound - the CEO said that it
> would be enough as far as he concerns.
> Will something like Endian do the job?

No idea, never used it.  I was one of those Rainer mentioned that
tried a _lot_ of tools (including commercial solutions like PIX)
before coming back to pfSense.  I actually found pfSense by way of
m0n0, I was looking for something like it that was a bit beefier and
did (at the time) HA setups.

As far as whether you need a GUI is completely up to you.  My CLI
curve has a dip in the middle - small and huge things I want to do
without a GUI, but moderate loads (like daily/weekly rule changes)
make clicky-happy tools somewhat more requisite.  Most DIY setups
won't have the nice reporting tools and extended feature-sets that
polished distros like pfSense do, but in your case your need for
performance may well outstrip the need for those.


RB

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