Astaro
This is my second attempt to write this BLOG. The first attempt went into the Ether. I did save a copy in the clipboard but I killed it off almost accidently. I have been using ASL for about three years or so. Basically I got sick of writing firewall rules for Linux – there were just too many things to do.
Well, that was becasuse I wanted incoming and outgoing rules, and worked out that I really needed a seperate firewall. ASL is an amazing piece of software. I will not say it is impossible to break into. I will say that it is several orders of magnitude harder than any other Linux box I know of, and if you did get in then it would be almost pointless as to how the system works.
For instance if you break into my SMTP proxy, you do not have access to any other parts of the system. You cannot have access since this is in a CHROOT environment. This is very secure since it is such a basic concept in Linux and Unix.
It is easy to admin through a Web interface, and most of the time works very well. I have been using it since version 1.8 I think – and I have just upgraded to version 5.0. And the product has improved a lot.
The machine needs to be relatively well powered – like a 1 GHz machine with 256 mBytes RAM. It does need this and something like 8 mBytes HDD for all the proxy caches and logs.
I love the firewall software. Really cool.