Edge Device
I found a great Open Source product the other day while looking for a way to monitor me network @ work.. Untangle (UT). Here were my requirements:
- Had to be Open Source (schools have little enough funding)
- Should have firewall and IDS/IPS components
- Would be nice to have QOS
- Must be transparent to my users
- Must have good/active user forums
- Must be Easy to maintain
I set UT up as a transparent bridge and stuffed it in between my last switch
and router where it can see all traffic going into and out of my network. I
tested it for a while in my office before deploying it on my network and
decided that I liked the interface. It's been up for about a week now and
no problems in production. I will caution you, that is you are going to
run it headless, you will need to enable SSH. I know it may sound
goofy, but it didn't occur to me to do it during my testing because I had
access to the console but 10 min. after I put it on the network I needed wanted to access something that was not on the web
interface. Also with SSH you can modify
(with extensive help from the forum) the default install to add among other
things nTop, a nifty little program to show
bandwidth usage and network usage statistics.
Considering I have nothing more than time invested in this machine, I would say it serves my needs quite well.
More Later...
--
twitter @dkirkland
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