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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I love the firewall software. Really cool.<\/p>\n
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 …<\/p>\n