Firewall Wizards mailing list archives

Re: External Load Balancing


From: Mark Teicher <mht3 () earthlink net>
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:26:05 -0700

A majority of vendors who build appliances build it for one reason. They do not have to hire a bunch of highly skilled technical people for customer support. Provide a nice color glossy diagram with lots of circle and arrows, and the customer(s) are enjoying their appliance purchase, not unlike the early days of firewalls, where most companies stated: "Oh yeah our stuff works on that variant of Unix or Windows" But in reality, one needed a Phd to configure the underlying O/S just the right way before the firewall application could be installed, all this with technical support on the phone or on site.

/mht

At 07:40 PM 1/9/2005, Marcus J. Ranum wrote:
Kevin wrote:
>One advantage of the Radware products is that they are true
>appliances

Appliance, schmaiance!

What's in an appliance? Software.
What's in a Windows box? Software.
What's in a Linux box? Software.
What's in a Cisco box? Software.

"Appliance" is just a frozen configuration of a software/hardware
combination. Sometimes it's a good configuration of good
software. Sometimes it's not. I saw one "appliance" that had a
back-door telnetd on a "hidden" (who'd ever think to look for telnetd
on port 1823?!!) port. Geniuses build appliances. Idiots build
appliances. Your mileage may vary.

But if you just assume "appliance == goodness" then you've
been drinking too much marketing kool-ade.

mjr.

_______________________________________________
firewall-wizards mailing list
firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com
http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards

_______________________________________________
firewall-wizards mailing list
firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com
http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards


Current thread: