Barracuda web filter boxes

[bubba]

Anyone have experience with them?

Looking at it as a possible alternative to Websense for my work.

[Darkstar]

I heard they were good, looking to replace websense myself (such a PITA) also planning on looking at Cymphonix which has the deep packet scanning.



i think they do 30 Trials..

[kenc51]

Never used them, but it's very popular with our customers.

I tend to keep things simple and just use "Squid" for proxy and filtering

[bubba]

I'm looking at as they do pretty much the same thing and the Cuda box is more then half the price per year (950 vs 2,600) of Websense requires a full on server, which in my case is needing to be replaced with a new box to run the current version of Websense.

I know there is a lot of people switching to them, but looking for people that use them. Websense can be a real PIA sometimes.

dunno.. off to look for some more user reviews.

[chrisman2731]

I work for a large medical company with 20+ sites and we looked at Websense, Barracuda and a few others. The Barracuda solution at the time (1 year ago) was not designed for large companys and lacked clustering, distributed management etc. I also did not want to put these on dedicated servers and esp not on windows for 24/7 operation. We bought resilience appliances for dirt cheap and they run 800+ user sites and never have problems or require reboots. Also they run a stripped down linux OS and run at less than 5% cpu utilization and very low memory utilization. at our larger sites we cluster them for failover. The only problem is the reporting modules run on windows but are extremely light and we share existing servers for those and do rollups to a central report server at corp.

[bubba]

My work is not that big LOL

I baby sit single site only with ~90 pcs, 12 servers, and a phone system. Of all that only 60 PCs have net access. I'm the only IT guy, so some days are slow, some days I dont see my desk at all LOL

I ended up getting a Barracuda 310, should have it by the end of the week.

[Darkstar]

you get it set up yet? let us know what you think of it.

thanks,

[bubba]

I got the box the other day. Some of the stinkiest packing I have ever encountered, smelled like a week old gym cloths. Stunk my office up .

Haven't got around to configuring it yet though. Mainly due to not wanting to come in stupid early or over the weekend to mess with it. The box goes inline between the WAN and the LAN and defaults to "block" rather than "open". So this next weekend I will get it set up so I don't get calls because the internet is down reminds me I need to get a copy of the custom block/allow off the old server.

Sucks being the only guy sometimes, but again there are days its nice I don't have to deal with crap from anyone else... then again I can't point the finger at anyone else either when stuff doesn't go to plan

[Darkstar]

I got the box the other day. Some of the stinkiest packing I have ever encountered, smelled like a week old gym cloths. Stunk my office up .

Haven't got around to configuring it yet though. Mainly due to not wanting to come in stupid early or over the weekend to mess with it. The box goes inline between the WAN and the LAN and defaults to "block" rather than "open". So this next weekend I will get it set up so I don't get calls because the internet is down reminds me I need to get a copy of the custom block/allow off the old server.

Sucks being the only guy sometimes, but again there are days its nice I don't have to deal with crap from anyone else... then again I can't point the finger at anyone else either when stuff doesn't go to plan

ahh, yeah .....the joys of being a one man IT Department....im in the same boat, my next working weekend will be to replace the file server though.....

[bubba]

Well... late night for me. When your Websense license ends it just doesn't stop updating, it stops working altogether.

Oh, well

Working on it now, upgrading the firmware. Then onto putting in the groups and what not.

[bubba]

Yeah, think folks around here gonna hate me LOL

Just the quickie reporting is nicer then what I had with Websense and I haven't gotten into the deep reporting yet.

http://www.bubbaspad.com/images/stuff/cuda.jpg

[Darkstar]

lol, better lock the office door.....

[Major_A]

So... the playboy.com isn't you testing the filter it was actual employees? If it's your coworkers then they are morons. I wasn't aware that people actually tried to look at porn at work.

[bubba]

it was me testing last night, there were some hits this morning. Yesterday was wide open when the Websense program was shut down by Websense.

You would be amazed at what some folks look at when they think no one is looking.