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Sonicwall SOHO Internet Security Appliance
Page 4
Author: Tim Higgins Review Date: 9/29/2000
Blocking
and Logging
As described on our "How
Firewalls Work" page, all NAT based routers do some sort
of "stateful Inspection". The difference in NAT firewalls
is how much inspection they do, and the SOHO does a lot!
The SOHO's focus is on blocking Denial of Service (DoS)
attacks and port scans, and it appears to do it well. I tried both
a port scanning program which scanned ports used by common Trojan and
similar attacks and also a Network Management tool which mapped networks
by pinging ranges of IP addresses. In both cases, the SOHO logged
and blocked the scans, and emailed me an Alert (more about that later).
It even properly identified the program being scanned for in some cases.
I didn't check any of the SOHO's DoS attack blocking capabilities, mainly
because I didn't have time to locate an attack program.
The SOHO's has many logging features. You can select what's
logged, and what is considered an Alert. There's also a Log Redundancy
filter that's enabled by default that prevents duplicate consecutive log
messages from being logged. These messages can be common, due to things
like network retry mechanisms, and SonicWall recommends keeping the filter
enabled to avoid unnecessarily filling up the log too soon. If the
log does fill up (which shouldn't happen due to the automatic log emailing
feature), you can choose between clearing the log and shutting down the
SOHO in order to preserve the log data. Detailed logging to a Syslog
server is also supported if you really want the gory details (if you need
a Windows or MacOS Syslog client, go to this
page).
But what good is all this stuff if you don't remember to
check it? The SOHO helps you out there, too, with log and alert
emailing. You can email the log to one email address at a specified
daily or weekly time, or when the log fills up. Alerts are sent
within seconds of detection, to a separately defined email address from
the log email address.
Reporting
Unlike the inexpensive routers which have recently added
logging capability, the SOHO does not keep a log of Web site access.
Instead it performs three rolling analyses, which can be viewed, but not
emailed:
Top 25 Most Accessed Web sites
Top 25 Bandwidth users by IP address
Top 25 Bandwidth consumers by service (Port and Protocol)
These reports will give you a quick idea of where your bandwidth
is going. You can enable and disable data collection and clear the
accumulated data, but can't save it.
72.2% | 
27.8% | out of 36 reviews 
