Smoothwall S10

[lmrogers]

Morning

 

I'm looking at my options for changing ISPs and filtering. I'm currently in a contract but may be looking to change.

 

One supplier is offering Smoothwall S10 UTM.

 

I have never used Smoothwall before and am just looking for peoples opinions on it and what their experiences have been?

 

Thanks,

[KevinB]

We have an S8 (the slightly smaller brother to the S10) and our experience has been extremely positive. We started a few years ago with an older generation of Smoothwall appliance and upgraded to an S8 on a new contract a couple of years ago. We're just renewing now for another extended period as it's just so easy to use and capable once you get your head around it. (That doesn't take long; the principles are easy once learned and apply across the Smoothwall's configuration options.) It's all policy based so e.g. with filtering you set up categories and category groups and can apply those filters based on location, user, time of day... there are loads of options. There's a load more too, with content modification, reporting, Safeguarding reports, live view, plenty of firewalling and traffic shaping options not to mention mail scanning for spam and malware... We find it to be a complete solution for our edge threat management and I can't recommend it highly enough.

[AlanD]

We use S8 too. I like it’s prevent reporting. I think it falls short in other reporting areas when doing an investigation...I like it’s BYOD radius option which provides easy authentication...DNS...DHCP if you want it....and AD group based firewall rules are possible. ...oh and it does reverse proxy. But it is extraordinarily expensive...as it’s larely based on free Linux stuff and if you bothered to write suitable reports you could do much the same for free with a bit of effort.

 

Take a good look at Sophos UTM which isn’t as good at reporting in my opinion, but otherwise has some nice extras including SSO for internal websites behind reverse proxy.

 

Light speed is also worth looking at.

 

While I don’t like locking filtering and ISP together, RM broadband can be good well supported product...even if you like nothing else about RM.

 

And I’d be looking carefully at internet provision. A few years ago a leased line was often the only viable solution, but faster download speeds are available for a lot less, using FFToD, or Virgin Zoom at a fraction of of cost and even with contentionfar outpace a 100mb line. ....internet providers don’t like losing their lucrative leased line market...so don’t be too taken by their negativity. And don’t rule out load balancing several FFTC lines ...again collectively faster than a leased line for a lot less ...balancing which smoothwall and sophos etc do well.