How secure is Astaro?

[beatmix01]

In an effort to keep costs down on my network, I decided to look beyond my tunnel vision of the cisco 515e restricted at some cheaper all in one firewall packages. Since the company is 26 people (3 remote) and I need to implement web filtering as well as email filtering I began looking at Astaro Security Linux (due to the cost element.)


So, here is my question, how secure is Astaro as a firewall?
and compared to say SonicWall.

My other option is to just set up Bayesian filtering on a cheap-o server w/ say squid proxy to do content filtering and keeping the pix firewall.
(Although I'd be incurring the cost of a cheap server < $1500.)

 

[n0cmonkey]

How much do you trust cisco? How's the warrantee for astaro? Would any extra downtime you get with astaro be detrimental to your family (as in, could you lose your job 😉)?

A quicky OpenBSD or Linux machine should be able to do mail/web filtering pretty easily. spamd or spamassassin and squid would be a decent solution. But I hate setting up squid. 😛

 

[Nothinman]

Security out of the box shouldn't be as much of an issue as use and configuration. If you know nothing about Linux it's very easy to configure it poorly and undo. Linux can do just about anything a PIX can do and a lot more, like you could likely put the squid proxy on the Astaro box (provided they won't void the support for that, I have no idea what their rules are).

 

[skyking]

The astaro commercial license includes a subscription to cobion for http proxy filtering. I tried out the demo, it did a good job on the things I tested it with.
Also included are DNS, SOCKS, POP3, Ident, and SMTP proxies. The same subscription price gets you antivirus from Kaspersky Labs.

 

[beatmix01]

Does anyone know what their support is like?