Edge Device

I found a great Open Sourceproduct the other day while looking for a way to monitor me network @ work.. Untangle (UT).  Here were myrequirements:

• 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 switchand router where it can see all traffic going into and out of my network. Itested it for a while in my office before deploying it on my network anddecided that I liked the interface.  It's been up for about a week now andno problems in production.  I will caution you, that is you are going torun it headless, you will need to enable SSH.   I know it may soundgoofy, but it didn't occur to me to do it during my testing because I hadaccess to the console but 10 min. after I put it on the network I needed wanted to access something that was not on the webinterface.   Also with SSH you can modify(with extensive help from the forum) the default install to add among otherthings nTop, a nifty little program to showbandwidth usage and network usage statistics. 

 

Considering I have nothing more than time invested in thismachine, I would say it serves my needs quite well.

More Later...
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