Ponder This

Sunday December 03, 2006

Retired my Qube - Finally

Well the time has come and I could not wait any longer. I had to retire my Sun Cobalt Qube. I have few of them actually. I came to Sun just as they were acquiring Cobalt six years ago. As part of the new hire training there was a competition and I was one of three people, out of hundreds that won a Qube. I Believe it was one of the few things I have ever won. At the time, it was the best there was. It was the Professional Edition with dual drives for mirroring. After a memory upgrade, it has been my personal web server and firewall at home for six years. I loved the Cobalt appliances. The customers that used them were passionate about them as well. It really did everything it needed to do as a home appliance. I started to collected parts for it, shortly after Sun decided not to continue on with the products from Cobalt. Because I was successful and securing components. I have been able to survive drive failures along the way.

A few months back I started moving all my lab systems and personal systems over to VMserver and ESX, in an effort to simplify things, reduce power and to build an environment that supports most the work I am doing these days. At the same time, I started a personal blog for sharing my dog training, travels and hunting experiences as I am an avid hunter and outdoorsman. While looking for a blog platform I opted for pebble. Its great and offers exactly what I need. I simply moved all the Qube services over to JES running on Solaris 10 as a Virtual Machine and left the Qube as the firewall. I keep regular snapshots and backups of the Solaris 10 VM image. Now, the whole thing is a lot more simple to manage.

The last part was to replace was the firewall function. I just do not feel comfortable with the low-end broadband devices. Last week I stumbled across the new Zone Alarm device. I ordered one last week and finished setting it up this weekend. So far it is great. It actually is very, very simple to set up. It connected instantly to my service provider using PPPoE. That is a lot more than I can say for my Dlink. It has a great logging feature and also offers advanced services for an additional cost such as SPAM filtering and Antivirus scanning.

There are a few features I do not like. The unit only allows five external connections. This can however, be upgraded to 15. I was a little concerned with this at first but, whent with it. Having now used it, I am not that fond of how they track the five connections. Any device that has the default gateway set will register with the device. So, if it makes any outbound connection attempt such as a DNS query, it uses a license. The license seems to lock for two hours or until the device resets, or whichever comes first. The other feature I do not like is the wireless. The wireless can not be on the same network as the device. For example, the wireless network needs to be 192.168.2.0 and the firewall 192.168.1.0. I am sure this is for added security however, its a bit of a hassle. The add-on services for SPAM control and antivirus seem reasonable priced for a subscription price but, could be cheaper I think.

All in all, I like it a lot and its cheaper than the devices direct from Checkpoint/Sofaware, as well as others from Sonicwall etc.