[tomsite]

>>Tom, what platform did you move toward when you tossed Crossbeam?<<

Went back to trusted Nokias and funny enough, not a single problem since then. One can say about Nokias what they want, but i found them always stable and never really had any problems. We still have internally some old ip650s running even still with CP4.1. We had to swap one couple of months ago for a new IP380 as i didn't want to support 4.1 anymore and we had a problem. The problem was a nice reason for me to purchase new HW and upgrade to NGX. However the old HW only needs a new IPSO and an update of CP and it will be as new. Don't ask me how old that 650 is, but it is ancient and still doing a fine job. During all my experience (7 -8 years now) with Nokias i came only once across a failing NIC, but due to the design it was fixed very quickly. At an investment bank we did a test how long it takes us to replace an entire Nokia (out of rack, into rack, restore config and policy push from management) with two people. The time was less than 5 minutes even without sweating. And that Nokias run a BSD, well who cares..... it's a *nix in the end, almost the same like Unix, Linux, same like AIX or HP-UX. Sorry, but i worked with all sorts of *nix OSs so nothing scares me anymore and i find my way around on all systems. You simply have to consider that a Nokia is a purpose build appliance, the OS does exactly what is necessary to run CP on it, not more, not less. It does not claim to be an appliance for all sorts of different software. I rather have a box that runs stable than a box that supports all sorts of applications but runs like a dog. And a firewall is a firewall, not an AV Server, not an IDS or IPS or whatever else. Tell anybody to get lost if they want to sell you a firewall appliance and offer to also install ISS or other software on it.

And where a Nokia is overkill simply take SPLAT. Is good enough for most applications.

Tom