Checkpoint NGX Chat

[dan2003]

Me and some friends have a checkpoint chat channel setup on IRC. It currently does not have many people which is why im posting here. We would love to have more checkpoint users in channel so we can have some interesting discussions and also have a place for help. The irc info is:

server - EFnet(irc.blessed.net or irc.prison.net)
channel - #checkpoint

hope to see you soon.

[sz-cisa]

perhaps a yahoo group is a good idea

[BarryStiefel]

I want to make this discussion board as useful as possible. If there's something we're not offering here that you'd like to see, please let me know and we'll see what we can do.

What do these other proposals offer that we don't have?

[Porter]

great! I like IRC, try to connect this evening :)

[Porter]

I'm online, where are you? ;-)

[RobertGraham]

IRC would be real-time as opposed to a more delayed post and wait. Both mediums have their advantages and disadvantages. One is interactive, the other provides long term documentation for multiple parties to benefit from.

Yahoo Groups is like Usenet, this is like Usenet. I don't see any advantage there. Many have seen the msg from Phoneboy that he is looking at discontinuing the gurus list. The official Check Point FW-1 list still has much traffic, but I prefer this venue.

[BarryStiefel]

Originally Posted by RobertGraham

IRC would be real-time as opposed to a more delayed post and wait. Both mediums have their advantages and disadvantages. One is interactive, the other provides long term documentation for multiple parties to benefit from.

Yahoo Groups is like Usenet, this is like Usenet. I don't see any advantage there. Many have seen the msg from Phoneboy that he is looking at discontinuing the gurus list. The official Check Point FW-1 list still has much traffic, but I prefer this venue.

I'm a subscriber to PhoneBoy's list, but the last message I received was on 2006-08-27 at 10:14. Has anyone received one since then? I had concluded he'd shut it down.

I'm also a subscriber to Check Point's Firewall-1 mailing list and because I'm curious I've prepared a graph showing the message posting traffic levels for all three of these Check Point communities. I've attached it here.

I think the mailing list idea worked best years ago when people typically connected to the Internet only a few times per day and it made sense to carry around a copy of the entire archive in your computer in the form of e-mail messages. Now that fast Internet access is available almost everywhere, I think it's more useful to have the archive in a specialized web-based application like this discussion board software. I think vBulletin discussion board software (what we use here) is the sweetest way to do this.

The graph shows the story of the number of posts per month on each of these three Check Point communities. At this point, cpug.org has about an 80% market share of new monthly postings. I would suspect that Check Point would eventually kill off their mailing list due to declining message volume, although there may be political pressures to keep it going. I'm confident that we take really good care of their customers here and I invite them to join us and work together with us in some way. I think cpug.org is the most useful web resource available for Check Point users and I think everybody would be better off if Check Point would simply point their customers here.

Does anybody have an archive of messages from either the Check Point or PhoneBoy mailing lists from before February, 2003? I'm working on making an online archive of both mailing lists available to everyone here on cpug.org. I'm trying to integrate all of them into this discussion board.

[Porter]

I know someone who's subscribed since years on both lists, I'll ask him if he archived the stuff

[northlandboy]

Barry, there have been some more messages on fw1-gurus in the last couple of days - specifically a couple related to whether the list should continue, and then a couple of technical issues. It has been quiet recently though.

fw1-gurus is low-volume, but I like that. It's low volume because it's moderated, so you don't get much rubbish coming through - most of what gets published is useful, relevant stuff.

I stopped subscribing to the Check Point list a while ago, because it just had so much rubbish on there. So many questions without basic details, where no effort had been made to resolve the problem.

Oh and there are archives out there for those mailing lists.

[BarryStiefel]

Originally Posted by northlandboy

Barry, there have been some more messages on fw1-gurus in the last couple of days - specifically a couple related to whether the list should continue, and then a couple of technical issues. It has been quiet recently though.

fw1-gurus is low-volume, but I like that. It's low volume because it's moderated, so you don't get much rubbish coming through - most of what gets published is useful, relevant stuff.

I stopped subscribing to the Check Point list a while ago, because it just had so much rubbish on there. So many questions without basic details, where no effort had been made to resolve the problem.

Oh and there are archives out there for those mailing lists.

Thanks for a good reply.

Perhaps I got unsubscribed from PhoneBoy's list a month or two ago.

I think we're rather lucky here in that the signal-to-noise ratio is so high and there's almost no garbage that I feel like deleting when I see it. I think we've got a really good culture here that's largely self-regulating.

I suspect that after dealing with Check Point for a while it's a huge relief to come to a site like this where we're just really trying to be helpful and giving each other a break. Oh, and it's both useful and free, which has to be a breath of fresh air for Check Point customers.

[melipla]

Nice graph. I got onto the irc for a bit the other day but wasn't sure if I was in the right place. The bot names seemed off.

I also checked out the mailing list, found it to be interesting, with a number of posts.

Mailing list signup (checkpoint.com)

Mailing list archive (securepoint.com)