[K12OSN] Meeting with district

[John Lucas]

On Thursday 02 November 2006 11:58, Steven Santos wrote:
> Yes, BSD makes for a great firewall.  But BSD won't solve his problem.  The
> FortiNet firewall makes the upstream techs happy, then I say its a small
> price to pay.
>
> As K12LTSP useage grows Todd can easily place more and more K112LTSP
> servers and other linux workstations and servers behind this firewall until
> the whole school is behind it.  And it will then be very difficult for
> district to tell you your interfearing with their operations.
>

I concur with your assessment. The real problem he faced was bureaucratic, not 
technical. 

It might be worth the effort to get "them" to agree to monitor that firewall 
closely and present a report on what "problems" they discovered and to modify 
their ad-hoc connection policy based on the outcome, so that others in the 
district don't end up each spending $1000 for something they don't need.

I thought it would be useful to post a link to a pre-assembled, fanless, 
monowall solution for $215 (hardware for 3 LANs and software pre-installed):

	http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=60&products_id=209

It *might* be worthwile to counter-propose this "commercial" product (but then 
again it might not, you don't want to piss anyone off). You could buy 10 of 
these for one Fortinet, *and* there is widespread support for monowall. The 
same hardware can support pfSense or IPCop, but not from the vendor, it is 
based on the PC Engines WRAP 1E-2 board.


-- 
        "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it rhymes."
                        - Mark Twain

| John Lucas                          MrJohnLucas at gmail.com               |
| St. Thomas, VI 00802                http://mrjohnlucas.googlepages.com/ |
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