Simple Family Computing

The family was getting sick and tired of actual and imagined virus, tojan and keylogger invasions. Having personal FW and virus software on each PC (like ZoneAlarm, Norton, McAffee…we’ve tried them all)  is important, but as the only line of defense seemed weak. Also this is hard to administer for the 10 PCs we’ve got kicking around here.  After all, sometimes one does skip the updates.  So Mr. Wolverine and Ms. Weasel agreed it was time to step up to network firewall with intrusion prevention and content security filtering. 

After considering everything from open source Linux distros to a $3000 Astaro appliance, we settled on the Sonic Wall because it was a) cheaper ( around $800) and sounded like it would be easier to use. Mr. Weasel would be in charge. We also prepaid for 2 years of updates to IPS rules.  We opted out of the McAfee PC virus deal.

It has been installed since Xmas season 2007.  More about our user experience in the next post