[ Manager's note: This message got lost in the shuffle during the last
mail loop on Firewalls. My apologies for the delay. -Brent ]
Prior to October of last year, I used to be in the group that ran the
campus network at a large University..
It is just not obvious to me that a firewall is so obviously a requirement
in a University environment. We didn't have firewalls. And yes, we
did have security problem from time to time.
> >I'm from a small liberal arts college and I am trying to fight a political
> >battle with a few faculty to implement a firewall at our site. The
> >computer science faculty at our college believe that security is only a
> >hindrance and that a firewall will hamper their "academic freedom".
Well, the "academic freedom" thing does have something to say for it.
While you may precieve it as being thrown in your face as an
unassailable argument, it does have it merits, too. When your
Computer Science Department does research on computer networks, it is
very likely that a firewall will be a real problem. Firewalls also
tend to stifle the deployment of new and interesting network
applications, and Universities is where a lot of this stuff happens.
Finally, it seems to me that a firewall is most useful when you can
draw a line between the "good guys" that are "inside" and the "bad
guys" that are somewhere "outside". Well, when you have tens of
thousands of undergrad students, public workstations labs, network
connections in dorm room, just where do you put the firewall? Who are
you protecting from whom? There are probably some sites that might
argue that the firewall should be protecting the Internet from the
University. While its true that the threats are probably different,
it is hard to imagine not putting some non-trivial effort into
securing individual systems on the network.
Louis A. Mamakos louie @
alter .
net
UUNET Technologies, Inc. uunet!louie
3110 Fairview Park Drive., Suite 570 Voice: +1 703 204 8023
Falls Church, Va 22042 Fax: +1 703 204 8001
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