ITchurch.com

In honor of Valentines week, we thought we’d vent a little frustration and develop the idea of online hardware dating….

So this week we’ve been remarkably quite over at ITchurch because we’ve spent every available moment setting up our new mail server and beginning the process of setting up our new file/print/dns/wins/dc server. Whew.   In addition to killing our online blogging time, it’s also wrecked havoc on our lovely spouses, but I am happy to report that we managed to get things functional quick enough to enjoy our V-Day out with our wives, (eh…we each have one..)  It was a grueling week, and I learned that if you yell curse words at your server at 9:00pm in a church, God indeed does understand, and won’t strike you dead.  Honestly the hardest part of this whole procedure wasn’t the migration of our existing email users to the new server, that went really well, and in the midst of all this we are changing our anti-virus and saving a ton of money moving from Symantec to Trend-Micro (non-prof discounts!).  No the hardest part was our lame firewall.  We use NAT for the firewall to communicate in and out of the network, but it turns out that if you put the path (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx–>xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) on any rule it permanently creates an alias of your outside to inside path and negates the entire NAT rules.  this is by the way, very annoying, and until you learn that little fact, virtually impossible to find or recognize.So I come to you today, with a fixed Watchguard x700 POS firewall.  Unhappy and ready to move on to a new relationship.  But it’s a tough out their.  So many bars and so little good firewalls at them.  Seems like all the good firewalls are at home protecting their networks, not out looking for cute networks to date….Eh, what’s a network to do…. Well, I’m turning to you guys, here is my online network dating ad, help us find a good, solid, inexpensive firewall…. or at least share what your using and what your likes or dislikes are.

Seeking an nice, clean, outgoing, firewall type that is known to hang around open-source crowds, must communicate well (understandable interface).  I’m a 75 person network with 5 faithful servers that needs the protection that only a true firewall can offer.  VPN is a must, please no smokers.