[KLUG Members] A plea for firewall ideas

[Adam Bultman]

Hello everyone.  This is a plea.

At work, we are going to be upgrading our firewalls to a new system, as 
yet undecided.  We are in the final stages of deciding exactly what 
we'll be using for firewalls very soon.

We have ~40 servers, the majority of which are linux.  We currently have 
two linux routers created by imagestream (www.imagestream.com), which 
aren't enough.  An 'outside consultant' has decided that our best route 
(based on anecdotal evidence - ONE EXAMPLE of a high-traffic example in 
CA) is to drop in a few OpenBSD boxes into a almost complete linux 
environment.

I'm having a bloody heart attack, since I'm the only sysadmin and 
currently have way too much work to do.    I'm recommending some sort of 
firewall appliance (something sturdy, something strong) but I don't 
think it's taking hold anywhere. 

If you have ideas for firewall distros for  heavy use (sorry, smoothwall 
and the like won't cut it), let me know. Doesn't matter if it's linux 
based, or something 'appliance-like'  , I just need to have enough ideas 
to at least drown out the OpenBSD idea. 

Please, flood my inbox;  I really don't have the time, to deal with yet 
another type of system on my network, let alone having to go from zero 
to 100 with an operating system AND all the routing behind it - load 
balancing/failover, etc (I've used OpenBSD before, but nothing like this).

Adam