On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Peter Pauly <ppauly at gmail dot com> wrote:
> My boss is the type of person who would rather pay more (loads more)
> for a Cisco ASA because paid support can be found for it and there are
> "lots of people who know how to support it". I need to counter these
> arguments in order to implement m0n0wall.
>
> 1. Are there any companies in the USA supporting m0n0wall (paid support)?
>

Yes, under pfSense support subscriptions we also support m0n0wall.
https://portal.pfsense.org

and we send money to Manuel for any m0n0wall support sold. The support
initially started off on a project-neutral site for pfSense and
m0n0wall both, but the support demand has been almost exclusively for
pfSense to date.

The site doesn't mention m0n0wall support (yet, lack of time), but
we're the best qualified option available for m0n0wall commercial
support (and actually the only one I know of, aside from a number of
consulting companies who provide support for their local/regional
customer bases).

m0n0wall isn't some esoteric system that requires specialized
knowledge to run. Anyone who can admin a commercial grade firewall
through a web interface can admin a m0n0wall.


> 2. What major (well known) companies or organizations (Universities,
> etc) are using m0n0wall in production?
>

Wow, a lot... but specifics... my memory of who runs m0n0 and who runs
pfSense is running together. Most of the big ones tend to use pfSense
because they need redundancy that CARP provides, and/or need a larger
state table but don't want to recompile the kernel. Three I know of
offhand that are publicly known are parts of the University of Texas,
Purdue, and one of the datacenters that hosts part of foxnews.com, all
running pfSense. There are several state government agencies across
the US using it also, and a few Fortune 500 companies, as well as
countless small to medium businesses. I can't specify any of those as
that isn't public information, the ones I identified you could find
yourself searching mailing list and forum archives.

I personally have m0n0wall deployed in several dozen small businesses
and it just works, and people love it. It's a proven solution.

-Chris