TMG vs Pfsense

C

CiscoInside

Gawd
Joined
Mar 26, 2010
Messages
546
What are your weigh ins on either or? I have been running pfsense on my firebox for almost a year now, and besides the times that I have to reboot it because the services stall (usually I find this out when I am trying to VPN into the network) it has been running fine.

I am currently working on setting up a TMG box with an Exchange Edge role that will sit between my network and the pfsense. I am just starting to wonder if there is just going to be a point where I will just phase out pfsense all together.. just wanted to hear thoughts on what you think of the two.

Thanks
 
I'm using TMG 2010 Enterprise at work. I had a 265 day up time before I had to restart the services to apply a hotfix related to how TMG handles TLS SMTP (it worked, but I needed to change the default behavior of sending a TCP RST at the end of a session to a TCP FIN).
 
Microsoft Firewall / Gateway = sucks. Well in my opinion it does. We had TMG running at our office and we got rid of it for a standalone Sonicwall with content filtering. Our network performance has been so much better since getting rid of it. I've never really cared for Microsoft's firewall products since it was called Internet Security and Acceleration server 2004

As for PFSense. When I ran it at home it worked great. Never had any issues with it besides the fact it ran on some older hardware and randomly rebooted in the middle of the night when nobody was using it (We heard the little tone it makes when it's fully started up).
 
TMG or ISA as a proxy isn't bad, but I wouldn't use it as an edge firewall. Now that we have deployed a bunch of them to customers we have found lots of little things about how it does firewalling and IDS / IDP that we really don't like.

So I wouldn't recommend it but you may find it works for what you need.
 
Well for right now it is going to sit behind the pfsense box, so pfsense will be the edge and TMG will be primarily for Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.

But if I get used to it and like it better I might just shut down the pfsense box. Then again, I love how my firebox looks in the rack!
 
CiscoInside said:
But if I get used to it and like it better I might just shut down the pfsense box. Then again, I love how my firebox looks in the rack!
Click to expand...

I know what you mean. A glossy fire engine red firewall is extremely sexy.
 
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