Untangle Appliances NG-50F Start to a Review - PICS!!

Yes brian they are silly, I love being dell rep, its the train to become one
 
Anyone else see that unused mini-pci express slot and think that this would be a great place for a WLAN card?

pci-e.jpg


Untangle + a/b/g/n? Sign me up!
 
MinPins said:
Anyone else see that unused mini-pci express slot and think that this would be a great place for a WLAN card?

pci-e.jpg


Untangle + a/b/g/n? Sign me up!
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or you could save your self the hassle and $4 and just buy a nice access point and call it a day!

Most of the time these go into rack or in basement setups, so having wireless built in is kinda useless.

Access point for the win :)
 
How would buying a separate access point be a net savings in money?

I'm sure that if the rack case was replaced by an ASA 5505 style desktop case, with wireless, there would be demand for a linux/bsd based firewall with integrated wireless, after all, Cisco/Juniper/Sonicwall have been able to sell them.
 
cymon said:
How would buying a separate access point be a net savings in money?

I'm sure that if the rack case was replaced by an ASA 5505 style desktop case, with wireless, there would be demand for a linux/bsd based firewall with integrated wireless, after all, Cisco/Juniper/Sonicwall have been able to sell them.
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how much is it for the wireless card ? How much is it for the antennas, how hard and is the unit capable of mounting the antennas to the case ?

a access point is what 80-100$ ? why would you want your antenna way down or far away, when you can actually put it where it needs to be.

Just saying, but i'm sure that Jim, has thought about this and thought long and hard, plus compiling drivers for the card's, let alone all the different type's of cards that are available, just more stuff for him to support.

j'
 
dashpuppy said:
how much is it for the wireless card ? How much is it for the antennas, how hard and is the unit capable of mounting the antennas to the case ?<snip>
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Mini-PCI "N" WLAN card $21-$36, antenna $22. No need to attach the antenna to the box, set it up on top of the rack or a shelf. N range should cover the area of most modest homes/condos.

What do you think the reason is that they put the mini-pci on the NG series mobo for then?
 
MinPins said:
Mini-PCI "N" WLAN card $21-$36, antenna $22. No need to attach the antenna to the box, set it up on top of the rack or a shelf. N range should cover the area of most modest homes/condos.

What do you think the reason is that they put the mini-pci on the NG series mobo for then?
Click to expand...

Maybe we can get Jim to asnwer. i'm not sure why they did. Maybe it was for the wireless, maybe it wasnt.

Not sure.

Personally i would not buy one if it had wireless built in.
 
With access points, you have the luxury of putting that wireless signal...."where it's needed" in offices. Flexibility...good.

Wireless routers....you're stuck with the wireless signal originating where the network originates...which is businesses is often in a back room or closet or...."some spot out in the back or finance office". Flexibility....limited.

And the big show stopper folks....Untangle does not support a wireless interface...aside from not having wireless NIC driver support (which yes would be sorta easy)....the main point is...it is not coded at all to deal with wireless security protocols...it doesn't know what WEP/WPA/WPA2 is. And I don't believe it's on the roadmap as a feature,

I don't like or want wireless combined with the router for my clients. That's more often the case with others. Fine for home and SOHO and the smaller side of SMB, but Untangle isn't aimed at that..which makes sense.
 
I am aware that Untangle doesn't currently support WIFI, it's mentioned in a few threads on their forum. However the overwhelming majority of available mini-pci devices in the marketplace (do a search on google shopping for "mini-pci" and you will see what I mean) are WLAN cards which lead me to believe that they might have been working on this. I also assumed that they could possibly patch the necessary WLAN code and drivers into Untangle even through third party FW and SW if necessary. There already are Linux drivers out there for many of the Intel mini-pci cards.

So the mystery remains then; what other purpose could the mini-pci be intended for?
 
wwan.... i believe those are sim card slots. i believe jim mentioned along with someone else they were toying with the idea if untangle could work withit, to have a cell broadband card. which would make it good for some remote areas.

and if you look on pfsense forums integrated wireless doesn't seem as easy, only a handfull of mini-pci cards work, and they get expensive.

i think it would be cool if costs could stay low, but i also usually just add a D-Link DAP-2553 into the mix. $159, usually put it where I need it.
 
MinPins said:
So the mystery remains then; what other purpose could the mini-pci be intended for?
Click to expand...

For other distros that may use the same base motherboard hardware that Jim selected for his NG appliances.....they may well indeed use it for WLAN cards.

The fact that Untangle doesn't support it, nor (AFAIK) intend to...keeps it from being a mystery to me.
 
Actually we are toying with the idea of using the mini-pcie slot for 3G WWAN. I have talked with the great folks at Untangle about co-developing support for WWAN and they love the idea. Imagine the possibilities of a 3G failover, or even a 3G Untangle router that will work anywhere you put it, no WAN cable necessary.

I love the idea for using it as a WAP too, as this has been done in past versions of Untangle. The only problem is that there is little or no documentation, its not officially supported, and the features would break and have to be rebuilt every time Untangle upgrades to a new version.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
With access points, you have the luxury of putting that wireless signal...."where it's needed" in offices. Flexibility...good.

Wireless routers....you're stuck with the wireless signal originating where the network originates...which is businesses is often in a back room or closet or...."some spot out in the back or finance office". Flexibility....limited.

And the big show stopper folks....Untangle does not support a wireless interface...aside from not having wireless NIC driver support (which yes would be sorta easy)....the main point is...it is not coded at all to deal with wireless security protocols...it doesn't know what WEP/WPA/WPA2 is. And I don't believe it's on the roadmap as a feature,

I don't like or want wireless combined with the router for my clients. That's more often the case with others. Fine for home and SOHO and the smaller side of SMB, but Untangle isn't aimed at that..which makes sense.
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Thank you :) exactly what i was trying to say, however no one takes me seriously because " oh look only few months member"

People like your self and I, like to put the wireless access point's where it is needed.
 
I would say that WLAN capability is useful, but without official support from Untangle its not viable. We could make it work, its been done before, but investing that much time into a mod that WILL break after an upgrade is not a very good investment. We couldnt sell it.
 
I prefer to keep Untangle a UTM. Add wireless and people will want a built in proxy, add that..and people will want a built in NAS, and then they'll want a built in WWW server, and database, and ....pretty soon you have this big bloated jack of all trades pig that does nothing well.

In business networks you really don't see home grade "built in AP/router/firewall combo"....dedicated APs spread around are the wiser and more often employed choice. Leave the all in one things for home users.

What we do is SMB for a living, I've slowly been deploying Untangle for a couple of years now..but remained held back because of "hardware" stuff....but since your NG series came out...we're about to go crazy with it and deploy it at a lot of clients. I cannot think of one of those clients where I could use some tiny underpowered built in mini PCI WLAN card...even if it had balls and wasn't some tiny underpowered card but a real honkin card with large high gains...I wouldn't use it.
 
It has limited use in limited scenarios. Obviously, the lower end appliances are geared toward smaller offices, which may find built in WLAN of use. Other appliances, such as the NG 100 are geared towards larger sites and WLAN would be of no use.

Just so you know, built in caching proxy will be released with Untangle 8.1 or 8.2 at the latest. Its the next feature being built into the system.
 
Bummer about the proxy....but not a biggie, I simply won't install that feature. I found it useful back in the dial up days....for clients offices that visited limited websites frequently..such as law firms. ..sharing that dial up connection (or shotgun/colt/multilink banks of modems like the WebRamp or 3Coms version, or Proxy Server). But it tends to require maintenance. With broadband...really little need..and thus...bye bye to something else that need maintenance. I don't want to see UT follow the route of adding every feature that a few scream for....the growth to bloat will sink them. Yet they ignore a widely..hugely widely popular request of adding IPSec. (I know you have your own thing in the ropes).
 
dashpuppy said:
Thank you :) exactly what i was trying to say, however no one takes me seriously because " oh look only few months member"

People like your self and I, like to put the wireless access point's where it is needed.
Click to expand...

Having a small *nix based router with built in wireless would be a huge benefit for the office that I work at, which currently has 0 firewall (and all public IP addressing in use, no less), and a bunch of linksys wap54g's which are shit. If we had a box with pfSense or Smoothwall and a built in wireless nic, this would be a huge benefit for us.

Furthermore, the original post about wireless was (MinPins) noticing the mini-pcie slot and saying, hey, it would be nice if there was an appliance that did untangle (or another *nix router) that had a built in wifi AP.

The reason why (some) people don't take you seriously isn't because you've only been a member for 8 months (which is not, in any way, a short time, furthermore, I don't think that anyone cares about how long you've been a member for. What matters is knowledge and experience. I don't expect a random hardforum member from 8 years ago to be automagically more knowledgeable than an 8 month old member.) The reason why (some) people don't take you seriously is because (some) of your posts are ridiculously dogmatic. I get that Untangle (on a dedicated box) and dedicated wifi APs is a formula that has worked for you and your customers, however, it is not the gospel. Lashing out at others because they don't use the exact supermicro board that you do and that 'they are not doing their security infrastructure properly' (I don't remember the quote exactly, which is why I only used single quote marks) is not a post that is an effective contribution to a discussion (which is the objective of hardforum).

Of course, take it with a grain of salt. I don't do any of this professionally. I just do this stuff 'for the lulz'.
 
cymon said:
Having a small *nix based router with built in wireless would be a huge benefit for the office that I work at, which currently has 0 firewall (and all public IP addressing in use, no less), and a bunch of linksys wap54g's which are shit. If we had a box with pfSense or Smoothwall and a built in wireless nic, this would be a huge benefit for us.
Click to expand...

Good grief at the very least, within the first 5 minutes of seeing that I'd freak out...run down to the store and get a 60 dollar Stinksys home grade router out of petty cash fund just to hold things over until a good unit could be budgeted and provisioned.

And then format and reinstall all of those business PCs that were sitting on full public IP addresses for god knows how the freaking fu$& long.

Office..business...handle any customers financial or health info? Add "calling all of them to notify it was probably lost" to the "to-do list".

Even a 60 dollar el cheapo home grade router running NAT is better than sticking your PCs bare bottoms out on the internet with vasoline smeared on the cheeks screaming "rape me".
 
Would be nice, right?

We get our internet service from a medium-sized public university. We're not allowed to use NAT. I talked to the network people who service our campus, and we're not allowed to set up a transparent firewall, either.

Fortunately, we're just a research lab, so we don't handle any PII/PHI. Any reasonably sensitive data is stored offline (on paper).

I'd like to put a palo alto box between us and the university, but they're just so damn expensive (we have an optical uplink so building an untangle box to connect us would be $$$. we're not allowed to touch the switching configuration, so we can't just have the untangle box span some vlans.)
 
Just deployed a NG-50 with 1GB (NG-25 were on back order).

Speedtest did suffer
Last Result:
Download Speed: 25457 kbps (3182.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 4060 kbps (507.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

Installed AD Connector and Policy Manager, haven't used Policy Manager yet. AD Connector is installed. Everything running is good, disabled the Spam Rack because I use postini.
 
did you turn off the attack blocker during the speed tests?

My speed test on a comcast 16x2 cable pipe - NG 25 appliance
 
no left it the way you sent it. just curious why wasn't Ad Blocker installed by default? Not recommended?
 
No its recommended, it just doesnt install with the lite package for some reason. I often overlook installing the ad blocker.

Re-run the speed test with the attack blocker turned off.
 
same speed, could be cached, that speed is the same we got with the older firewall should be fine. happy with everything =)
 
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