As a result of wider economic pressures, IT in general today is shaped by one dictate: reducing costs. This is why more and more businesses, especially small and medium sized organisations, are currently using cheap solutions, or even consumer products, to protect their IT environments. The imperative to reduce costs also results in many postponed projects and more careful spending of budgets. The free Essential Firewall edition from Astaro aims to support small and medium business owners with the necessary functionality to be secure today at no cost, as well as expanding as their needs grow.

The Essential Firewall edition is based on the Astaro Security Gateway and delivers the fundamental functionality required to protect customers and their networks. If more functionality is needed over time, the customer can upgrade to the full Astaro Security Gateway.

As a free edition of the Astaro Security Gateway, the Essential Firewall offers the same easy-to-use Graphical User Interface and is available as Software and Virtual Appliance. Additionally, the Essential Firewall edition will come with the ability to receive support through Astaro’s user forum (www.astaro.org).

Features included in the Essential Firewall edition:

• Networking: Internet Router, Bridging, DNS server & proxy, DynDNS, DHCP server & relay, NTP support, automatic QoS
• Network Security: Stateful Packet Inspection Firewall & Network Address translation (DNAT/SNAT/Masquerading)
• Remote Access: PPTP and L2TP over IPSec support (including iPhone support)
• Logging/Reporting: Full logging on local hard drive, searching, real-time reports for hardware, network usage and network security, daily executive reports
• Management: Web-based GUI in local languages, setup wizard, configuration backup & restore, administrator notifications, SNMP support, centralized management via Astaro Command Center (also free of charge)

While this is a good move which will allow IT admins who have been “secretly” using the home version to protect their businesses breath a sigh of relief, we must note that the free business version drops the ball in providing the “essentials” that small and medium businesses need – web, mail and malware security are glaringly absent in this version.

This is a big mistake. The home edition provides more security than the business version – a reversed situation. Of course, the ultimate goal is to ease business owners in and allow them to see the business value and the need to get the “full” version.
I do not believe in teaser software especially for critical environments like businesses. If you want to give it away free, then make it truly free. Moreover, it goes counter to the statement by the CEO of Astaro, Jan Hichert, as to the company’s motivation for this release:

Small and medium sized businesses are the backbone of the world economy. They act more cautious, they maintain a stable business and they are not subject to the high demands of investors. But nevertheless, SMBs are affected by the current economic climate even more so than larger businesses. This is why we see more and more businesses fall back to consumer products to secure their IT environment (emphasis mine) – in order to reduce costs, they lower their level of security. This is a dangerous compromise. By launching the Essential Firewall edition we aim to provide those companies a professional alternative.

Terribly crippling the so-called business version, runs counter to the stated objective and seriously dampens the incentive to even try the software, especially when there are comparable products out there like Untangle, Smoothwall, ClearOS – formerly ClarkConnect, IPCop, and pfSense to name a few.

From the changelog, a few significant bugs were fixed:

• More than 25 bugs fixed in KMail, KDE’s default email client (remember that KMail was the buggiest application in KDE 4.3).
• Many bugs in kwin, KDE’s window and compositing manager (something like Compiz, for those of you who doesn’t follow), most notably the bugs with the wobbly windows effect, has been fixed.
• The bug which caused konqueror to crash when doing “Close all other tabs” has been fixed.
• kio_fish, which allows for remote file manipulation through SSH, now works.
• Editing toolbar setup no longer results in a crash.

Users with KDE 4.3, who may want to upgrade will get it in their reccomended updates (Ubuntu and variants) and can just upgrade from there. However, for those with an earlier version, upgrade to the new version can be done by opening terminal/konsole and running the following commands one after the other.

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backport/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
(this adds the ppa.launchpad.net to the sources list)

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 8AC93F7A
(this adds the security key)

sudo apt-get update
(this will update your file list and pull new files from the server)

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
(this will run the upgrade process)

• Start your computer from the Windows Vista Installation DVD
•  Press a key when prompted to continue
•  Choose your language, time, keyboard and click Next
• Next, click “Repair your Computer”
•  Now, from the System Recovery Options dialog, select the
  “Operating System” you want to repair, then click Next
• From the “Choose a Recovery Tool” dialog menu, select “Command
  Prompt”
• Type the following into the “Command Prompt Window”:
  bootrec.exe /fixmbr
• Remove the Vista Installation DVD and restart your PC.

Now, this does not always work. Sometimes the computer goes into a loop and restarts over and over. When this happens, I usually just do a repair. With Vista of course, this process is done in the backgroung and you are not really sure if it’s working or not. At least, with Windows XP, you actually saw what was going on after you hit F8 and ”R” like “deleting files”, “copying files” etc. Windows Vista does not really give us the F8 option and only tells us that it is “repairing disk errors” which “might take over an hour to complete.”

If all else fail, you may have to re-install and re-activate. I have had to do so a couple of times simply because it was a lot faster than trying to mess with it.

I recently bought a couple of NAS devices and each one of them failed woefully to do what was advertised.

First is what I actually started calling the Great White Turd. It is the Netgear sc101T. I have come across ridiculous devices before, but this one takes the cake for its total uselessness as a NAS device. What is the point of hard coding a “NAS” to use DHCP and no option of setting a static IP address. What part of “network” was missing during the development of the product? The SC101T forces you to install a client software on all computers that may need access to the device. The software cannot be installed on a server class Operating System like Windows Server 2003 or 2008. You have to mount the drive and share it to be accessible but since it is assigned a DHCP IP address, anytime you restart the computer, the drive mappings are shot to hell and you have to do it all over. For a product that retails for $180, I am almost tempted to start a class action lawsuit so we can recover some lost revenue due to emotional distress caused by this piece of crap.

Next is the Iomega StorCenter ix2. I was actually enthusiastic when I picked up this $300 device – compact case, easily accessible drive compartments, sleek brochure, nice web interface etc. That enthusiasm quickly vanished when I wanted to replace the two 500GB hard drives that came with it with 2 ITB  drives I had lying around. Never happened. It looks like these geniuses installed the free Linux NAS software on the hard drive instead of loading it as a ROM on the device. To make things worse, the software would not work on Windows Server 2000, 2003 and 2008. The EMC Retrospect backup software that is included is crippled because you cannot install it on a server. What am I missing? Since when did network Operating Systems become taboo in managing network devices? This lazy attempt to copy Microsoft by segmenting everything as Home, Road, Workplace, Media, Professional, Ultimate etc. is really annoying. Everyone is jumping into the NAS market with all kinds of totally useless devices with fancy titles and making billions of dollars while cranking out repackaged USB devices that should be retailing for nothing more than $50.

I had the same problem with Buffalo Linkstation TeraStation II a while back and encountered the exact same limitations. I could not use the device in a network environment with Active Directory even though the product was advertised as being compatible with an AD environment. After sending a blistering email to the support team, they offered a  replacement with a $2500 model and I had to pass.

When I was going through a box with old box with old devices, I came across a Franklin eBookman 901. It was still in its original box so I decided to try it out. I can tell you right now that I am seriously praying for that company to go bankrupt. The stupidity of their configuration is inexcusable. For some weird reason, they coded it so you cannot access the device unless it is plugged into a USB port. Totally unnecessary. I should not need a USB port to use the other functions of a “PDA-Like” device. Needless to say, I promptly trashed it.

I strongly believe OEM’s are very calculated in the way they release these products to the public. The mindset is that after buying the “Home/crippled” edition” which will obviously fall short of what you need it for, you will be “encouraged” to buy the next one in line which is ultimately more expensive and is just a re-badged version of the one you currently have with some disabled functions enabled. To me, this is the worst form of deceptive trade practice.

What I ended up doing was buying a 2-port SATA adapter and slapping it on an old PC I had on hand. I added two 1TB hard drives and installed the free Linux software called FreeNAS which many of these vendors and manufacturers use (although they would rather have you not know that) and I had a fully functional NAS  appliance. Total cost, less than $200 ($87 each for the drives, $20 for the SATA card).

This is a very serous problem, especially for small business owners. Not everyone has $2000 – $15000 to spend on network storage. In many cases, a simple 1TB  USB device works great, but there are times when it is helpful to make a device available to network users so they can store files they deem critical on the network.