Hello,
I live and work in Greece, where most IT people have never reallyused any
*nix system. To these people, compiling packages, patchingthe kernel and things
like tarballs are the deavil's doings. In myexperience, it is important for a
company or an organization to have acompany to support their infrastructure,
whether that company iscalled Cisco, Check Point or Juniper etc, especially if
they do nothave people with the necessary expertise.
Ease of use is also important. Hardware appliances obviously are inno need of
the X or Y dependency package. Also, software solutionsthat provide everything
in a single CD (Check Point even offers theOS) are in general much less of a
husle to install. Having a uniformsolution that takes care of issues such as
configuration (of multipledevices in many occasions), log viewing, reporting
etc is importanttoo.
To summarize, commercial solutions promise to offer easy of use,added
features (that actually work) and a sense of security, meaningthat someone will
help the customer when trouble comes (hopefullysuccesfully).
Hope I helped,Haris
On 6/9/05, Joseph (Joe) Lynn <Joe.Lynn@tiniusolsen.co.uk> wrote:> > > > Hi
all, > > > > Sorry everyone, forgive my ignorance, but I'm still a bit
confused on these> issues – I don't understand why anyone would buy a firewall
that has a cost> associated with it rather than just taking a bog standard pc
and installing> an open source firewall on it, such as IPCop or OpenBSD PF. > >
> > From the responses to my post about IPCop and the messages about OpenBSD,
it> looks like these options are as secure as you're going to get. > > > >
Perhaps it might be easier to configure proprietary firewalls, and they> might
give better logging and analysis options, but presumably, certainly> with
IPCop, and I would assume, with OpenBSD, you can find adequate Open> Source
options that will provide any of the functions that the other> firewalls do
(with the exception of ISA2004, which sounds like it works with> the
applications rather than the packets….) – like e.g. snort. > > > > Do people
just buy firewalls because they can't be bothered to learn to set> up Open
Source systems, or is there more to this that I'm missing? > > > > Many
thanks, > > > > Joe > > > >
