On 10/12/07, Elvedin Trnjanin <trnja001 at umn.edu> wrote: > Are you experienced enough with that firewall or any software, that > you're confident the implementation of it will go smoothly? Would you be > able to train others to be competent enough to maintain it? I've found > (albeit in my limited experience) that those two things are more > important and decisive than any case study you can present. Without a doubt. Corporate firewalls are very important these days, so a commercial firewall isn't necessarily a bad thing. Depending on the size of your company and your requirments, there are many commercial products that run embedded OSS. Watchguard Firebox products and Astaro Security Gateway run their own embedded versions of Linux. (At least the Fireboxes used to, I haven't looked at one in a few years so things may have changed.) Anything new in IT generally starts in your server room/data center/infrastructure, not on the client side. Where is OSS going to fit in in your environment? A internal web server, perhaps running a Wiki (Dokuwiki is nice for quick technical documentation) to document your IT infrastructure/coding project/etc. is an easy sell. A Nagios, Big Brother, or similar network monitoring package is also a good project if you don't already have something for that role. Find problems/issues that can be solved with OSS, going OSS just for the sake of going OSS is going about things in the wrong direction. If you want an OSS project to be successful, pushing it as free, OSS, Linux, etc. ins't the way to go. As with any solution you implement in IT, it must be the right tool for the job. Just because it is Open Source and Free doesn't make it the right tool for the job, but when it is the right tool those factors are great added bonus. -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue >0; 0 rows returned