[Gllug] Opinions on Smoothwall and other firewalls

[Jake Jellinek]

Hi,

I've had both experience of Mr Morrell and the product itself and I 
certainly agree with all of this, apart from perhaps the doubts about its 
security. If it is set up sensibly it is essentially as secure as Linux can 
be (which is pretty secure IMO) and it is an extremely useable and easy to 
configure product., and you have the ability/knowledge to double check 
improve any aspect of course once you're running it.

I went on the chaps Java IRC page on the web site and flame baited him a 
little by saying "surely closed source firewalls are more secure" and all 
the usual crap that mis-informed people come out with. Rather than make any 
attempt to educate me or explain why I was wrong, his reaction was to swear 
at me, call me names and ban me from the channel.

I found it a little upsetting because if I had genuinely believed what I 
was typing, and had this reaction, I would hardly be going to change my 
mind about the benefits of Open Source etc.

It's also a shame that what really probably is the best product of its 
kind, has this underlying ethos to it. But it is stated to be GPL and the 
source code is now available, so someone should just tweak it and rename it 
and start up a more sane development team! (ouch, forking...now that's 
another whole subject)

Jake.


--On 05 October 2001 09:47 +0000
--Bruce Richardson apparently said about the subject "Re: [Gllug] Opinions 
on Smoothwall and other firewalls":

> On 10/5/01, 10:12:22 AM, Peter Chauncy <Peter.Chauncy at PoplarHarca.co.uk>
> wrote regarding [Gllug] Opinions on Smoothwall and other firewalls:
>
>> I am looking for a firewall to sit between a  2Mbit leased line and a
>> network of about 80 odd PCs.  I just discovered Smoothwall
>> http://www.smoothwall.org from a search on Google and it seems really
>> interesting.  Does anyone have any experience with it, and resultant
>> opinions ?  What are the alternatives ? From my reading of the
>> documentation, smoothwall's big advantage over alternatives is its ease
> of
>> use.
>
> Smoothwall has caused a lot of excitement on uk.comp.os.linux.  Not
> because of the quality of the product - serious doubts have been raised
> about its security - but because of the antics of the development team.
> The lead developer is mentally unstable and childishly abusive.  They
> recently tried to mess with the license in a way that would have broken
> the GPL and violated the license terms of much of the open source code it
> is based on.  They refused for some time to release the code of the
> latest version - in violation of the GPL.  When challenged on these
> violations they lied, on Usenet and on their website.  The support
> community is craven and passive because of the behaviour of Richard
> Morrell (the above-mentioned nutter), who is apt to shout, scream and ban
> people at random.  The rest of the development team are more normal but
> persist in a) denying any violation of the GPL b) pretending that Richard
> Morrell is a sane and reasonable human being and c) insisting that black
> is white if the alternative is a bollocking from Richard.
>
> Whatever the actual quality of the code (something which their behaviour
> has made difficult to assess), the quality of the support (and support
> community) is a vital component of an open source product like
> Smoothwall.
>
> --
>
> Bruce
>
> --
> Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
> http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug
>



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