WatchGuard Firebox 500 Firewall ( WG30500 )

Rating:
Summary: Hidden Costs, Bugs, and Frustration is the Norm
Review: Initially, I thought this box would be a decent and adequate as a firewall product, but then between many little bugs and frequent stress from network outages, my opinion gradually changed. Their were many small problematic bugs with their proxy filters for web and mail. There web filter bugs hampered the newer Windows XP system update process, and with mail filter bugs, users were not receiving important e-mail from clients. Specifically, one mail problem was with the **standard** ESMTP BDAT style of mail, which Exchange 2003 uses.

After talking with their tech support (after hefty re-instatement and support costs), we found the product has not been tested with Windows 2003. Excuse the sarcasm here, but it's almost 2005, and 2005 minus 2003 is like um two years. Does this mean their product will only tested with major operating systems two years after the fact?

We had numerous problems with this box due to network outages with the firebox crashing and restarting (these bugs related to PPoE negotiations). We tried to search for support documents and firmware updates, but these were unavailable without a pricy support contract. I don't know if my opinion is shared, but this seems quite distasteful.

We had no choice but to purchase the support, but were unable to until we paid more money for the right to be able to purchase support. They called this process "re-instatement".

In our recent adventure, we wanted to use this box as a branch VPN using the standard L2TP/IPSec. We found that site-to-site VPN only work with other firebox models, and to get support for the standard, we have to purchase a license for it.

Lastly, this product is built around Linux and uses freeware tools. It just seems wrong to have all these creative schemes to loosen pocket books of unsuspecting users and businesses with free software.