Product Reviews
FutureSoft DCS Firewall Plus 3.0
- By Chip Andrews
- 09/01/2000
FutureSoft’s DCS Firewall Plus 3.0 touts itself as a “Third
Generation Stateful Multi-Layer Inspection (SMLI) Technology.”
Besides SMLI, the feature-rich DCS Firewall Plus package offers
an IPSEC-compliant VPN, Application Proxy, IPX support, NAT, and
ActiveX/Java filtering.
On the downside, my initial DCS Firewall Plus installation failed
with warnings of registry inconsistencies. A second installation
seemed to solve the immediate problem, but then I was plagued by
some glitches with the administrator utility. In addition, administrator
alerting proved thin in that it allowed for email alerts only.
In its favor, however, DCS Firewall Plus is a comprehensive firewall
solution incorporating just about every feature on the block. The
user interface is fairly intuitive for a product offering so many
options. In addition, FutureSoft has, I’m thankful to report,
separated DCS Firewall Plus’ firewall management utility from
the firewall engine to help both local and remote administrators
access the firewall. While the DCS Firewall Plus engine is NT-only,
the management utility executes on just about any operating system
that Microsoft still sells.
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FutureSoft’s DCS Firewall Plus supports
heavy-duty advanced IP options, but you need an administrator
qualified to handle these and the many other options the package
offers. |
Despite a few quirks, DCS Firewall Plus is a solid contender loaded
with an impressive arsenal of features. The package is best suited
for medium-sized companies that require advanced firewall functionality
and have the personnel qualified to navigate the huge number of
options this product offers.
About the Author
Chip Andrews, MCSE+I, MCDBA is a software security architect at (Clarus Corp.). Chip maintains the (sqlsecurity.com) Web site and speaks at security conferences on SQL Server security issues.