Thoughts on Barracudas?

[Michael H. Martel]

--On August 21, 2006 1:51:13 PM +0100 Julian Field 
<MailScanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> What is your opinion on the Barracuda appliance?

I don't like it.  I was forced into it by Management.  They were wowed by 
the graphical front end that allowed individual users to manage their own 
white and black lists.  I think that the biggest thing it's got going for 
it is the graphical interface.  Remove that and it's not that good.

> How easy is it to use?

Easy to use, but not very flexible.  You can't edit scores for rules, and a 
lot of the settings are for the entire box and not per domain.

> Does it actually work?

Yes, it does.

> Can it survive the loads they say it can?

Don't know.  We push about 40k messages a day through it in the summer, and 
about 120k messages a day once classes start (today!).  I don't know what 
it's rated for.  We're using a model 600.

> And, of course, how does it compare with MailScanner?

The only thing that it does better than my MailScanner setup, IMHO, is that 
it blocks at the SMTP level based on black lists.  I just haven't bothered 
to enable the checks in Sendmail to do this myself. :)

I haven't found anything that the Barracuda does that I can't do in 
MailScanner.  Other than the GUI.




Michael

--

  --------------------------------o---------------------------------
   Michael H. Martel              | Systems Administrator
   michael.martel at vsc.edu         | Vermont State Colleges
   http://www.vsc.edu/~michael    | PH:802-241-2544 FX:802-241-3363