RE: Hardware vs. Software firewall reliability

[Bill Stout <Bill.Stout () AristaSoft com>]

Thanks for the generous responses on this topic.

I remember when the response to running a firewall on a custom-coded O.S.
(embedded or not) was overwhelmingly negative because of the trust and
review issues involved.  

For building an IPsec VPN, I initially chose $500 'firewalls' (SonicWall).
Quick, easy, fast.  However they're also limited, quirky, not redundant, and
not scalable.

An oft-mentioned option is FW-1, and Nokia.  For personal reasons I'd rather
use a hardware firewall which has failover, ability to scale, to filter
VPN'd traffic, with high-strength crypto and PKI.

Bill Stout
_____________________________________________
"There was some offending code in 3.0, but it has been removed." - NSA
official, RSA '99