Just an FYI Astaro Home edition now support 50 IPs

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Ryan711

[H]ard|Gawd
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One of the thing that has kept me from trying Astaro is that it used to only support 10 IPs for the home edition. Just went to their website and apparently they've upped it to 50 IPs. I'm not sure when they changed it, but their package for home users looks pretty nice.

http://www.astaro.com/astaro-security-gateway-edition-comparison

I know a lot of you are on untangle, and this seems to offer a couple of things free that untangle charges for like mulit-wan and enterprise webfilter. It seems to be the full unrestricted package other than the 50 IP limit, which shouldn't be a problem for most users.

They do offer dual AV scanning, though on mediocre engines, Clam and Authentium. Never heard of Authentium, but acording to AV-Comparitives it throws up quite a lot of false positives and scores about the lower end of the detection spectrum. Though I'm sure with a dedicated AV on clients it shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway just thought I'd make a thread letting people, like me, who were interested in this but could not compromise with the 10 IP limit know that if you have less than 50 devices on your network this might be a pretty good package. I'm gonna throw it on a machine probably today and test it out. I'll update with my impressions.
 
I have to chime in on this deal - I am pretty impressed with Astaro, in terms of both usability and flexibility. Their quality assurance can be weak regarding some of the additional features that you can enable on the firewall (IDS, AV etc) and sometimes they come up with updates that will entirely disable your network if you use that particular feature, however, as a basic firewall/VPN device, they rule. It is really easy manage, and the interface is well designed so you don't have to spend much time hunting around to find what you are looking for. I have deployed Astaro solutions in environments ranging from home users to 100+ desk companies, and as long as you stay under the licensed IP limit this is a "setup once and it works" kind of device. You do have to throw some halfway decent hardware at it though, so unless you have a T1 or less, don't use that Celeron on your closet.
 
dahlhana said:
You do have to throw some halfway decent hardware at it though, so unless you have a T1 or less, don't use that Celeron on your closet.
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This is pretty true of Untangle as well. Early generation P4 is where you want to start out with a couple gigs of ram and such.

I've always been impressed by Astarto as well. This is nice news for going to 50 IPs. If I remember Captain is using it at home as well and loves it. He always has good things to say about it.
 
Just wondering if a firebox x1000 would be up to the challenge of this. I am on a cable connection, 30/5 so I wonder if the specs would work.

It would be nice to use this box instead of using a full blown machine for it. I think they have a 1.2 Celeron or something to that nature.
 
if you have a firebox look at running pfsense on them. there is a lot of guys running pfsense on firebox hardware
 
CiscoInside said:
Just wondering if a firebox x1000 would be up to the challenge of this. I am on a cable connection, 30/5 so I wonder if the specs would work.

It would be nice to use this box instead of using a full blown machine for it. I think they have a 1.2 Celeron or something to that nature.
Click to expand...

From what I've been reading, that should work fine but you'll have to run a pretty barebones setup. Meaning no Content filtering pretty much. Just the basic firewall, etc. Depending on how much ram it has you might be able to enable some of the content filtering features as I would assume that this thing is more dependent on ram than CPU.

Also, did anyone try and sign up for the home edition today. It says it will email you a license and DL link, but I haven't gotten an email. Signed up with 2 different emails and nothing yet.
 
I've been running Astaro Home Edition off and on for years. I had to make the switch to Untangle around three years ago because of the 10-user limit that was on Astaro Home after I started expanding my home network quite a bit. I switched back to Astaro when they upped the user limit a while back, can't remember how long ago exactly, maybe a year... Anyway, I've sold and supported the enterprise version of Astaro Security Gateway and Web Gateway for around four years and always thought it was one of the best solutions out there, just expensive. The home version is outstanding, especially if you really want to geek out with it and create custom rules for different users/computers in the house. The web filter, and configuration, is hands-down the best of any you will find in the home/enthusiast market. QoS is better than Untangle and close to as good as pfSense. You get IPsec or SSL VPN access if you want it, can do site to site VPN tunnels with your buddies. IM and P2P filtering that actually works. It's just a really good product. I love Untangle, too, but after they started dumping ads in their block pages and made a lot of their neat features available to paying customers only, I started pushing friends/family back to Astaro. I will say Untangle is a bit easier to manager/configure but you get SO much more with Astaro its not funny.
 
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