On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Joe Murithi Njeru <joe.njeru@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello Guys n Gals,

Question:
Have a small network of 5 people. Need to get a router for 2 Internet
links, VPN, Firewall, IPS, Content & Application Filtering.

Which is a better solution.. purchase a CISCO router or implement a *NIX
solution on an old server?

Hi Joe,

What is IPS? You know, abbreviations may not be that obvious:-)

Let's see what we've got:

Suppose you did it the Cisco way, would it do content & application filtering? At what cost?

Me thinks that while Cisco may be better in handling the dual links, it may not be best suited for the other requirements unless you have a huge budget. I am not an expert with Cisco!
OTOH a unix box would easily let you achieve your requirements. The only challenge would be how you intend to use the two links. If you'd like to load-balance between them, some tweaking on the firewall would be required. If you need to split the traffic between them, then that would be easily achieved by your NAT rules. So with a*NIX box, the only challenge is the load balancing bit and zero cost (not absolute zero since time is costed).

--
Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254733744121/+254722743223
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