Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
Re:IBM secureway firewall
From: Peter Bruderer <brudy () bruderer-research com>
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 07:48:34 +0100
If I hear IBM secureway firewall, I think Jurassic Park. The IBM Secure Network Gateway was quite a reasonable product back in 1992. It was basically a packetfilter with a few proxy features. That product was actually the trigger for me to use qmail. It did not have a properly working SMTP gateway. Up to version 2.2 you could manage the filters using vi. Starting with version 3, there was a Java based GUI which was just user unfriendly, slow, ... and you had to install X-Windows on the firewall machine. It was no longer possible just to edit the rulebase and to restart the firewall software. What else? NAT? After a couple of fixes it was somehow working. To establish a reasonable rulebase, you had to spend working about 3 days with the GUI. The default rulebase was unusable. That was in 1997. BTW the mail gateway was still unusable, the http proxy did not work properly and the SOCKS configuration was "advanced". 1998 was a great relief. I stopped working for IBM. So I could stop telling everyone, how good this product really is. Last year, I had to review an IBM secureway firewall. And what a surprise! It is still very complicated to configure and the look and feel is still the same as back in 1997. -- Peter Bruderer mailto:brudy () bruderer-research com Bruderer Research GmbH Tel ++41 52 620 26 53 IT Security Services Fax ++41 52 620 26 54 CH-8200 Schaffhausen http://www.bruderer-research.com _______________________________________________ firewall-wizards mailing list firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
Current thread:
- IBM secureway firewall R. DuFresne (Dec 05)
- Re: IBM secureway firewall Paul D. Robertson (Dec 05)
- Re: IBM secureway firewall firegod (Dec 05)
- Re: IBM secureway firewall firegod (Dec 06)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: IBM secureway firewall Marcus J. Ranum (Dec 05)
- Re:IBM secureway firewall gattaca (Dec 06)
- Re:IBM secureway firewall Peter Bruderer (Dec 07)