Firewalls - Ease of Use and Maintenance?

Wed Nov 9 14:00:01 UTC 2011

> On Wed, Nov 09, 2011 at 03:32:45PM +0300, Alex Nderitu wrote:
> > An important feature lacking for now as far as I know is content/web
> > filtering especially for corporates wishing to block
> > inappropriate/time wasting content like facebook. 
> 
> 1. That's not a firewall function.  That's a censorship function.

A "firewall" is pretty much a censorship function, you're using it to
disallow certain types of traffic on your network.  It's simply a matter
of what layer you find most convenient to block things...  a firewall
is better closer to the bottom of the OSI layer model, a proxy is better
closer to the top of the OSI layer model.

Is it "censorship" not to want unwanted connection attempts to our
gear, and block unsolicited TCP connections inbound?

Is it "censorship" not to want unwanted exploit attempts to our
gear, and run everything through ClamAV, and use blocklists to
prevent users inadvertently pulling content from known malware sites?

There's no functional differentiation between blocking content for
one reason and blocking it for another.  There's certainly a huge
difference in the POLICY decisions that drive those blocking decisions,
but the technology to do them is essentially identical.  You can,
after all, block facebook on your firewall at the IP level and I think
we would both agree that that is "censorship" but also something a
firewall is completely capable of.  It's just neater and more practical
to do at a higher level, for when facebook changes IP addresses (etc),
so a higher level block is really more appropriate.

> 2. You can of course easily do that via a variety of means, including
> BOGUS'ing the domains in DNS, blocking port 80 traffic to their network
> allocations, running an HTTP proxy that blocks them, etc.  I presume
> that any minimally-competent censor could easily devise a first-order
> solution (using the software packages supplied with OpenBSD) in an afternoon.

It's a little trickier to do in practice.  I kind of wish pfSense
included such functionality by default, it'd be so killer.  :-)
Last I checked, it was possible-but-a-fair-bit-of-messing-around.

Still, vote++ for pfSense.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.