Fun fun fun

No, I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, I've just been preoccupied and haven't had much worth posting lately.

The other day I completed my in-depth eval of an Astaro ASG 120 security appliance. I have a call later today with them to get a couple of questions answered, and then I anticipate sending the demo unit back.

I received a demo Watchguard Firebox X to check out, also for possible use as a replacement for our Qube/IGear content filtering boxes. I should be setting it up later today. I've also had some discussions with SonicWALL and will probably be getting a demo from them, too.

This morning I wrapped up T&V of a new firmware release for our SMC8013 gateways. I ran into a couple of glitches, but no show-stoppers.

A private client of mine needs to limit Internet access for some of the PCs on his network, but is on a very limited budget. They have cable modem service from my dayjob, so what we're going to do is to use the SMC's ability to block Internet access from specified internal IPs. Their LAN is such that it won't be too onerous to switch all the PCs to static IPs, turn off the router's DHCP server, and then put all the PCs which need to be isolated from the Internet into a range with no outside access. I'm looking at a site visit on the 16th to implement this.