Opinions about Smoothwall UTM for school environment

[Vegemite]

Hi there. I'm a newby to posting, but have been lurking here for a while. I'm the IT Manager for a small (350 students) private school in rural Australia. I'm currently researching options for our web filtering and security and have come across Smoothwall. This doesn't seem very well known in Australia, so I would like opinions if this is the way to go, or any other recommendations that people may have before I spend big $$$.

I'm looking particularly at the UTM-300 hardware.

Whatever I do, I need to be able to do load balancing of multiple internet connections, as our connection out here is so slow.

I would appreciate your feedback.

Roger
Kadina, South Australia

[san_narula]

Hi Vegemite
I am in the same position as you. I also am the ICT Admin for about same size of school in country Victoria and looking to have a similar setup. I am planning to setup smoothwall UTM as firewall and filtering. I am also going to use it to share two ADSL2+ connections. Just wondering what's your connection speed as luckily we are very close to the exchange and get good ADSL2+ speeds. I have done a bit of research and people love and recommend smoothwall(especially for filtering) for school environment. Many people even swear by it. Just send a quote request to smoothwall and the Australian reseller will contact you. They also send you the UTM-300 hardware to trial for free if you want. If you do contact them let me know what quotes you get as I am also planning to try it soon. One more thing, I would personally prefer to go with the software option as I can have the hardware of my liking as I didn't like their hardware specification too much though its not particularly too bad. It also depends a lot on pricing.
Let me know if you need any more info.
San