[ale] OT: Firewall purchase

[vf5 at plm.gatech.edu (Vincent Fox)]

> > I know I'll draw flames bit I tend to see two mindsets in this list
> > group.
> >
> > The first one is those who want to reinvent the wheel to learn the
> > internals. The others are those who value their money far more than their
> > time.

Hmm, the original posts seemed to have lots of requirements that
tend to conflict. Like asking if any sub-$100 appliances could
support a business and run VPN and OSPF and all kinds of others
goodies.

I think you are taking the wrong thing out of this discussion.
The short answer is there isn't such an appliance. To expect
D-Link or Netgear to supply a product that does all this and
is that cheap would put Cisco out of business in a hurry.

So you boil down to people suggesting either expen$ive commercial solutions
or those who roll their own to keep it on the cheap(ish) side. If you
value your time more than your money, you will end up dropping a few
thousand at the very least on hardware and support contracts. I'm not
sure if anyone's mentioned it but in that vein you have some open
source-based solutions like the WatchGuard "Firebox" products that
should fill the bill of spend money get results. Can anyone speak to 
the quality of these products?