Barracuda Spam / Virus Firewall

J-B · 21st November 2005

Anyone running any of these?

Your views appreciated

Thanks

Julian

hosting365 · 21st November 2005

We had one for a short while. I wasnt up to 5% of the rated load unless you found 1-2 hour latency acceptable. We sent it back

othellotech · 21st November 2005

Had a customer with one, they asked us to "dump it in the f*ing thames" after seeing the same issues as hosting365

ncowles · 22nd November 2005

We've used one (400 Model) for the last 14 months and it's performed very well, with average latency of only a few seconds. 60 Domains, 1,500 user accounts and 30,000,000 messages received.

hosting365 · 22nd November 2005

I think the problem it has is with numbers of domains, it is not an ISP grade product, but perfect for corporatte or a small number of domains / accounts.

WFCS · 22nd November 2005

We ran two 400 models in a failover pair. The issue with the units is down to the number of domains and the number of users. The main problem is if a domain gets dictionary attacked. Each user has to have a set of folders created and this is where the unit then starts to slow down.

The best route is to hook the units up to an LDAP server with a defined list of users. This is practice is tough as you end up maintaining information in two places. We had some success using spamhaus as this reduced the dictionary attacks somewhat, thus reducing the load on the box and so on, but when the units broke the queue was just terrible to clear. We had one queue with 120,000 emails in it and it took 20 hours to de-queue.

Knowing the current Europen Director from another company he worked in, we chatted things through. Barracuda were sure that the units would do the job. Finally we sold one on eBay and the other we reformatted and are using as a nice (if expensive) 1 "u" test server.

We have chosen a very robust solution from software vendor Vircom. It is very scalable and robust, but above all, the support staff will talk to us!

Again, these are only my findings. The units are great for small companies (say 10 – 30 domains) or large companies with only one or 2 domains.

samb · 22nd November 2005

I've never used one of them myself, and after reading this I doubt I will be:

http://packetstorm.troop218.org/pape...acuda_Evil.txt

J-B · 22nd November 2005

Looks like more bad than good points.

Thanks for the feedback

Julian

si2040 · 16th December 2005

I would use spamassassin as this is the most effective system i've seen and it
stops most spam and try CalmV as this is another really good server application for viruses.