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Looking for a Hardware Firewall Appliance

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by stealthwifi 2 views

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Hey all, I am looking into starting a LAN gaming cafe in my area and am currently looking into some equipment. Any suggestions for a hardware firewall appliance that can handle the load of traffic that will be going through it? Since it's a gaming center I expect lots of traffic.

12 replies

by larryd4

www.watchguard.com these guys make a great product and have a wide variety to fit your needs.

You will probably have to open up ports for the secific game servers you plan to run. The Valve cybercafe platform has a lot of requirements.

But unless you plan on hiring a LAN/Security guru watchguard's stuff is a good choice.

by jdclyde

a novice is NOT able to configure, nor maintain a Watchguard product.

I am very displeased with mine, and the experience I have had with it. :(

by larryd4

We had a SoHo firewall at the school I taught in and it was a no brainer. It was simple and complete.

Have the new product lines changed that much? From most reports the watchguard products have the best throughput over all. Hence the reconmendation for the needs of the Cyber cafe.

What product line did you work with?

by jdclyde

http://www.sonicwall.com/

A good product that is easy to use, and always had decent support.

Watchguard was my single biggest mistake this year. Support is fair at best, and be ready to pay someone else to configure/maintain it for you as it is NOT user friendly.

by bens

No problems. We are using a rackmount X700 and use Watchguard System Manager to maintain it. All GUI interface, even with pretty little pictures (red light-denied) (green light - allowed). We are actually buying another here next month. I use a SOHO at home, web interface is equivalent to a simple Linksys.

by jdclyde

Maybe they have a different interface for the SOHO?

Sure, it does a lot, but you can not just sit down and use it.

I still don't have the spam quarantine working right.... :(

by larryd4

I worked at the school from 2000 to 2002 and then the SoHo was the product business model for Watchguard. I didn't choose it, the owner did before I got their, but it was a nice, robust, user friendly system.

I recommended the Soho 6 to a few clients and they were happy. But since then I've been around much larger enterprise stuff.

I may have to go back and take a look at the new stuff.

To:StealthWiFi
As Peconet Tietokoneet said in his post the Smoothwall products are great to. I'm not familiar with the hardware products. But they have a free public side to their stuff, www.smoothwall.org. And if your adventurous you could build your own firewall with a fast PC and two Gigabit nic cards.

I have had the Smoothwall free firewall on a 486, a Pentium, and now its on a P4 1.5 Gig and its working great.

by stealthwifi

I may try building that in some spare time, sounds like a fun project, maybe have some of the kids at the cafe build it as a learning project for them.

Cheers,

by stealthwifi

Thanks all so far for the great feed back. I am going to start researching them now :)

Cheers,

All other post's always welcome!

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