[Gllug] Opinions on Smoothwall and other firewalls

[Alex Hudson]

On Friday 05 October 2001 10:47, you wrote:
> 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.

Not just there - although the personal slanging match with JC was quite 
exciting.

The development team as a whole are pretty cool - the GPL problem basically 
came about because there seemed to be an unwillingness to let source out. 
This, combined with the Caveonet stuff, meant that people were worried that 
it was being taken closed-source. Now, there's no danger of that at the 
moment, and I've spoken to some of them on this matter and it was mostly due 
to a perceived lack of interest, as well as the nearly-released 0.9.8, which 
meant that they didn't bother initially. 

However, I know also about the antics which you describe. In many ways, it's 
quite appealing, at least initially, to draw parallels with DJB, but I don't 
think that's actually the case. 

> 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.

I know that JC has done some rudimentary analysis, and I'm sure you can find 
it in google groups. I've downloaded it personally also, and inspected it, 
and to be honest, there's not a great deal of it. How it will stack up 
against MPF and all the other personal firewall systems I don't know.

Cheers,

			Alex.

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