Originally posted by Vulcan
Not good enough. I want an exact technical explanation of the advantages of one personal computer, with a firewall and average AV software connected to the internet versus another personal computer with just mcafee 8i connected to the internet. I want to know exactly in technical terms the advantages of that cheap firewall.
that personal computer have to be a windows box?
If it can be a open source system, then you have a firewall for free, intrusion detection for free and you should pay for the antivirus software ONLY and if you really want to save, you have the ClamAVF that's also a free solution.
In addition you can scan all of your e-mail by amavis + clamav (or f-secure or anything) you can scan every "proxy" traffic and so on... for free, or pretty cheap when you want to pay for the antiviral software (that's what we decided to do).
If you want to be sure it's secure, you can cluster the linux boxes
Centralised management and reporting - you can write your own script or use some log analyzer (webalizer) to have a centralised reporting. It's harder with the management part, but after all, you have the admins to manager the thing... if not, most of the stuff is based on a config files anyway, so you could write a management console that suits your needs pretty easy.
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Everything whule we assume that you have a time to go with an open source thing. If you don;t have the time to invest in it, it's better to pay for a solution that it's already built
