Since then, Untangle has come a long way. I would like to revisit the untangle appliance as it has undergone numerous improvements, and in my opinion is now a fully capable replacement for an off-the-shelf firewall appliance.

Hardware update…

For a solid, and completely silent firewall for a business environment, here’s my current recommendation (Prices are for new components. Refurbished or used could result in a 30% – 50% reduction in price).
Server – ASUS rs100-x5/pi2: ~$300
Processor – Intel Core 2 Duo E7500: ~$105
RAM – 4Gb (2×2GB) DDR2667: ~$90
Hard Drive – WD RE3 or equivalent (200 – 500GB) SATA: ~$100

Total cost is under $600. This would be comparable to a $3000+ Sonicwall or similar appliance and would be significantly more quiet.

If you need more ports, a quality 4 port PCI-E Ethernet card runs about $350. The $1000 tag on this server with 6 Ethernet ports is still a bargain. A quality single port Ethernet card would run around $75. Don’t use a desktop Ethernet card in a server like this and expect good performance, you need a quality 3com, Intel or other enterprise quality card.

This is still a low-end server, but is silent and would work well for a moderate sized office. If you have the budget and usage to require it, you could put this on a dual quad-CPU server and put 32Gb or more ram on it. Additionally for any datacenter usage, you don’t need to worry about sound, so a more robust server could probably be setup for the same cost.

Unlike most human related computer activities, packet inspection and other firewall activities are very processor intensive. The faster the processors, the better a firewall appliance will perform. If you do decide to build a Untangle or other firewall appliance, keep this in mind. Embedded processors like Atoms, or VIA’s are not a good match for a firewall, even through they are designed to fit in compact sized enclosures. They work well for what they’re designed to do, but they are not designed for this.

Current hardware recommendations are as follows:

VPN

Something I didn’t discus in my last article was the VPN. Untangle comes bundled with openVPN. There is no limit other than that of your hardware for the number of VPN users your appliance can support. It is extremely easy to add, suspend and remove VPN users. VPN users are sent a custom key and connection for them to install on their computer. The VPN also supports site-to-site VPN allowing 2 or more offices to virtually share the same network no matter their distance from each-other.

Open VPN is much simpler than any VPN software I have used on either the client or host side. It makes VPN administration and setup a breeze. If you have used cisco, sonicwall or other VPN services, this will be a breath of fresh air in administration and setup.

Feature Improvements

When we started using Untangle, it was not designed to handle advanced protocols including some VPN services, and multi-protocol traffic like VOIP (Voice over IP) phone services.

I am happy to say that Untangle now fully supports multi-protocol traffic like VOIP or Ipsec. Some types of traffic will require custom configurations, but so far I haven’t found any sort of traffic that Untangle has problems with.

Untangle also now support firewall bypassing for high-availability applications, and supports a form of QOS (Quality of service). The QOS is very configurable, but still not quite a user friendly as other platforms. It is however usable despite some potential complicated setups. QOS is essential for running VOIP and other mission-critical applications. It can also be used to throttle down bandwidth eating services like online video.

OS Upgrades

Untangle is now offered in a 64bit operating system, something to satisfy the larger memory requirements for more robust servers. It is still a small custom Debian-linux build. The total install file size is around 500Mb, which is a fresh breath compared to the 3 – 4Gb sizes of many current Linux distributions.

There is also a Windows version for those who don’t have a dedicated server to run untangle on. In this case, Untangle works as a re-router, controlling the routing and traffic of a network, but on an existing windows XP computer.

Conclusion

Untangle has moved from an aspiring concept, to a true contender to established firewall appliances. At this point, I can’t see any reason why a business would spend the extra money on a Sonicwall or similar appliance. Pair this with OpenDNS, and you have a reliable system that can block websites on a DNS level, and a full featured firewall for spam, intrusion, phishing, viruses, and just about every other threat your users will encounter on the internet.

Untangle resources
Untangle Downloads (32bit, 64bit, and Windows)
Untangle guide (Wiki)
The Untangle Blog

If you don’t want to built an appliance yourself, there are plenty of approved untangle hardware vendors.

Where does your business fit-in?

The once a year rush…

The every holiday surge…

The B2B…

Or the product launch…

With Google’s and others’ free tools on the internet, a small business owner can get very good insight into business seasonality, and shopping search trends. If you have good relationships with your suppliers and manufacturers, it’s often possible to design pre-release campaigns for upcoming products. Search engines place some weight on the first websites to write about specific products or services. If you’re that website, you can gain considerable traction in natural search rankings, and possibly a huge sales boost once the product is launched. This is just one example of how trends like this can be used, but the possibilities are endless and the data is free.

MySQL 5.1 offers some major improvements in some areas to MySQL 5.0. MySQL 5.1 was released over a year ago and it’s been a long wait for those cpanel users needing 5.1 features.

Upgrading is not as easy as the 4.0 – 5.0 upgrade but looks to be a reasonable procedure.

Since I wrote that article about 2 years ago, not much has changed with Microsoft. I will say that their new online version of Office looks to be a vast improvement over Google docs or any other online based office software. Nevertheless, I think it’s time to take a serious look at dumping Microsoft for SUN. Microsoft’s 3 year Vista, Windows 7, XP saga has been nothing short of exhausting, and may very well be a fatal blow to Microsoft’s reputation.

SUN is emerging as a driving force behind free and Open Source software development, and I think that most businesses could thrive exclusively on SUN software and services. Besides the core Java programming language, let’s take a look at the free and open source products that SUN is supporting.

Operating System

SUN’s operating system is called Solaris. The open source version is called Open Solaris. It is a *nix based system much like Linux. SUN offers some major improvement other many Linux distributions, one being their awesome ZFS storage system.

Solaris is much friendlier than most people think. It has a nice user interface that can be customized to imitate many mainstream operating systems. Solaris supports all of the SUN software programs, Open Office, Netbeans, Java, etc.. It would be a huge undertaking to switch to SUN or any Linux without someone that can administer them, but Solaris is gaining popularity especially among the IT crowd.

There’s still some programs that many people use that aren’t compatible with Solaris or Linux. This brings us to Sun’s virtualization software.

Virtualization Platform

SUN has created an amazingly simple virtualization platform called VirtualBox.

What’s a virtualization platform?

Simply put, it’s a program that allows you to run another operating system without your primary operating system. It’s like opening a window on your computer, and installing and running another computer within that window. It shares the disk space, memory, and other resources of your computer, but you can start and stop it at will.

Virtualbox installs on a number of operating systems including Windows, Solaris, BSD, and Linux operating systems. If there’s some program you require that only runs on Windows, you can easily install a virtual Windows operating system. In reality you could have a virtual appliance for every operating system your company needs on a single computer. You can turn these off and on at will.

Even more interesting, is that you can backup your virtual appliance and reinstall it on any Virtualbox machine. In just a few minutes, and a few mouse clicks, you can transfer your entire virtual operating system to another computer, or keep it backed up on a central server.

The possibilities and benefits with virtualization are endless. Even if you don’t jump ship for SUN, I highly recommend looking into Virtualization for your company if it fits. VirtualBox works on Windows and Linux, so it’s definitely worth checking out.

Office Productivity Software

Open office has been around for some time, and it is still being actively developed. Open office is similar to Microsoft Office, but operates closer to Microsoft Office 2003. Open office rightfully remained similar to Office 2003 choosing not to follow Microsoft’s destruction of their own product as they did with Office 2007.

Open office has a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation program and a drawing program. The interface is similar to Office 2003. Open office programs are easy to use, and usually much faster than Microsoft Office on the same hardware. It will replace every Microsoft Office program except Visio, Onenote, Groove, Outlook, and InfoPath. With the exception of Outlook, most of us don’t use these programs anyway. There may be a slight re-learning curve when migrating from Microsoft Office, but it’s more of finding where the feature you’re looking for is located at.

Database

MySQL is the most popular relational database being used. It can scale to meet the needs of 99% of businesses out there. It’s free, it’s fast, and most importantly everybody knows how to use it, so support is readily available and cheap compared to Oracle, DB2, or Microsoft SQL.

If you need better performance out of the box, Google and Percona offer souped up versions. MySQL performance is very dependent on database design, and the hardware it is sitting on, but then again so s every database. If paying tens (many times hundreds) of thousands of dollars per year in support and licensing fees for Oracle or MSSQL doesn’t sound like fun, make the switch.

Application Development (Techie stuff…)

Application development is the area where I think SUN has made major ground in the past year. Apart from the Java package that’s been around for a long time, SUN has the Glassfish application server, and the Netbeans IDE for application development.

Glassfish is SUN’s Java based application server. An application server is something like a single package with all the functions a web or software server would normally have. An application server is generally composed of compatible, well established, programs within a single package, thus being much more stable and optimized than the traditional hacked-together server.

Netbeans is a full-featured IDE (Integrated development environment) which allows programmers to crease desktop and web applications. Netbeans supports at a minimum: Java, Ruby, C/C++, and PHP programming languages and their sub-languages. It is far better than most commercial and other free software like Eclipse.

While an IDE isn’t something that many business owners are interested in, it’s very important to anyone who works on their websites, or their internal applications.

What’s missing?

Email…

SUN has yet to come up with a suitable email solution. For that matter the only free email program I recommend is Thunderbird, made by Mozilla. Thunderbird is free, but can cause some major problems for those whom have huge mailboxes. My Outlook mailbox is about 15Gb, and I’ve seen some closer to 30Gb. Thunderbird cannot handle mailboxes this large, so don’t try. Thunderbird 3 is in a late Beta stage, and hopefully they can address the huge mailbox crash issues. The obvious cure for this would be for us all to clean up our mailboxes, but realistically that’s not going to happen…

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This is meant to be a framework for creating an ecommerce product page. There are of course many additional things that could be put on a product page, but these are the essentials that every page should have. The more features that a product page has, the more likely a user won’t notice them.

In the end, websites benefit from clean and well organized content.

Google Suggested that I drive over a pass called Schofield pass. While this could be just any old pass, but it’s not.

Schofield Pass is one of the most dangerous roads in Colorado. It is a 7ft wide rocky mess of a trail with a 500ft cliff on one side and a solid rock wall on the other. It has been called the most dangerous pass in Colorado, and boasts a near-vertical 27% grade in some places. Over 20 people have perished on it in past 30 years. Just a few months ago we saw an abandoned Suburban on it, who’s owner thought it safer to forget about his vehicle than to risk the descent. Until cleaned up in the recent years, the river below was littered with the remains of Jeeps, and Trucks that didn’t make it. Oh, and going up is 100x harder than going down, which is what Google Maps was suggesting.

Here’s a Youtube Video that shows very well, just how bad Schofield Pass pass is. At about 1 minute in, things start to get interesting:

So I got to thinking, how many similar passes in Colorado could Google be suggesting people to use. I found an additional 2, very dangerous passes, in about 5 minutes of looking.

Pearl Pass is the first, and Ophir Pass is the second.

Just a small section of Pearl Pass:

Ophir pass is the easiest:

Now all of these routes are in somewhat obscure locations, but the areas that surround them are visited by millions of tourists every year. It would be extremely easy for someone to pull up direction for a scenic drive on google maps, and …

So if you are a software, information, or anything else company, it may be a good idea to make sure your program isn’t gearing up to kill somebody. Based on the usage, I would bet that Google Maps has already done so somewhere!

Zusman and Sotirov call their attack “SSL Rebinding” and claim that it can be used to sniff sensitive data as it leaves the user’s browser or to conduct a browser cache poisoning attack against EV SSL Web sites.

This is a major blow to EV SSL certificates and their significantly higher price tag. Something like this is significant enough, that if you are using an EV SSL, it may be a good idea to downgrade until the exploit is fixed.

I think that while valuable, the programming posts are not aligned with the direction that I want this blog to go.

Future php, and programming related posts will also be added to the new site instead of this one.

Thanks