Product review and beta sites wanted: AstroFlowGuard

Sat Aug 23 11:08:04 PDT 2003

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 16:08:21 -0400 
Chuck Yerkes <chuck+baylisa at snew.com> wrote:
> Quoting Matt Olander (matt at offmyserver.com):

>> Intended as more featured firewall and network management and
>> monitoring station for small to medium sized sites.  Capable of

> Well, a firewall to me doesn't have all this other stuff - it
> compromises it's features as a firewall, but I understand.

Quite.  Its a scaling question.  For the smaller setups integration
makes some market and deployment sense.  Its not perfect, it suffers
oversight, complexity and audit trail problems, but at those scales it
makes sense.

>> Browser based UI (currently only IE but soon to be any browser
>> compatible) for all features.

> We like "HTML".  

There are a couple bits of the management controls which currently use
VBScript in the same manner many sites use Javascript to make things
like form behaviour a little more "friendly".  It is going to be fixed,
and soon.  You (and others) have been heard.

  Note: It is precisely this sort of feedback (and much else) that Matt
  was looking for.  Just me commenting on how popular iBooks are in
  NOCs, or how much &feature; is needed is a little less convincing than
  half a dozen or more people in the field coming up with , "We need..."
  and "This won't work for us because..." statements.

> Notes failed in many respects as an information repository because it
> was proprietary.  

Notes was also designed with the basic assumption that the corporate
networks it was supposed to manage the data from, would also be
essentially air gapped from the rest of the world -- certainly there
wouldn't be the free flowing bidirectional multi-protocol data exchange
or very transient or uncertain definitions of data ownership we now see
so commonly for the sorts of data sets Notes was intended to handle.

Notes was great for the world it was designed against.  Problem was that
world didn't exist any more (if it ever really did) by the time it
started trying to get into its stride.

> I'll not mumble about running an IDS on a firewall and the issues of
> Watching the watcher here.

True, and its a fair complaint were AFG aimed at a larger deployment
case.

  ObAdmission: I have occasionally consulted for OffMyServer.  I don't
  work for them, am currently under no contract with them, and have no
  formal relationship with them other than knowing the principle people
  in the company socially.  I have even less ties and relationship to
  the AstroFlowGuard product.  

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.