Endian Firewall

Last month I finally decided to install Endian as our office firewall.  For the last 4 years, we've been dependent on our hardworking Netgear home router to serve our needs.  This year however, we've had some difficulties in our glue-on networking infrastructure:  slow VPN, lack of bandwidth management, employees browsing unproductively and excessively during work hours, intermittent connections, and frequently dropped wireless connection.

We've found the latter to be due to a faulty wireless router.  The intermittent connection was frequent with our previous internet service provider, and also after brownout occurs.  I'll see on the next brownout if it will still be a problem.  For the rest, I'm hoping the firewall will help.

UDP not available in Sun Wireless Broadband

I wanted to give our warehouse an internet connection so that they can access our company enterprise inventory system through VPN or other secure remote means.  So I went to test Sun Wireless Broadband under Linux just to see if the connection will be a good fit for our warehouse. 

Internet browsing, and email works smoothly.  However, when I tried OpenVPN which uses UDP, I couldn't connect.  It looks like Sun does not allow UDP traffic through their service.  I'll wager UDP wouldn't work with Smartbro or Globe either.  Fortunately, remote NX connection over TCP works just fine.

I'll have to think it over whether to set our VPN connection to use TCP instead and live with it.