You got well intentioned, helpful, and useful advice and complained about it, don't be so ungrateful.

The Linode staff will only tell you the same thing people on this board already have.

Wow....just wow. This person is making a pretty legitimate request and you all taunt him? Seriously?

So a hardware firewall that sits in front of your Linode would benefit no one especially if it was integrated into the control panel and preserved logging? I personally think it would be a great feature as it would lower resource consumption on those linodes that do a lot of traffic and firewalling.

To those of you who said "well you can do this with iptables" true just like you could have done load balancing a number of ways but I would argue Linode's way is much more efficient.

I'm all for this request as a few other providers offer it and it would make it easier for newer users to protect their Linodes. It would especially be great if it included an IPS function as well. This would also allow Linode to compete more in the business side of hosting.

I have to agree, most of the responses in this thread represented Linode and the community pretty poorly. What's worse is some even inferred their own poor response would be echoed by Linode staff.



Exactly.

And in full disclosure, no, I probably wouldn't personally subscribe to a firewall service but the request is entirely understandable and for all I know there may be enough users that would subscribe to such a service. If you use a Node Balancer in front of even a single Linode you have a similar effect if you remove the public IP address (i.e. lish configuration).

I think its also worth pointing out from the GoGrid link in the original post, it is not a free service they provide and the monthly fee seems rather - steep, imho.

Yeah, the forum's gotten rather defensive of late. :-\ Generally it's great, but if something could be perceived as critical of Linode -- and not everyone agrees -- boom!


Yeah, when we all know the Linode staff response will either be complete silence or an announcement in the beta forum in a month or two.

(Personally, I don't need a firewall service.)

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

In case of DoS attack this firewall can drop bad traffic and that traffic will not be payd by customer. If you will just use "iptables" you will pay for any incoming traffic, even if you will drop these requests on your node. It's a big difference, very big.

Why should the firewall service not charge you for blocked traffic? It's still crossing into Linode's network and costing them money.

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Not "should", but "can"
iptables can't anyway.
That's the reason why this firewall can be useful and desirable. Also, if this firewall will handle traffic before the Node Balancer, it will be cool.

You might want to reread the thread:
Post 1: request
Post 2: Can't you do this on your own linode? How about...
Post 3: Yeah, not sure it'd be useful because...
Post 4 (OP): Attacks posters 2 and 3 ("peanut gallery") etc.

Basically at post 4 the OP has invited taunts. If, instead, the OP had written "yeah, I'm aware of iptables but I'm looking for an external managed firewall service because of..." then the thread would have gone in a totally different direction, but once you insult your audience then little good is gonna come of it.

It might make sense, from linode management perspective, for them to be more proactive in monitoring the forums and lock threads that start to go down this path because, as has been pointed out, it doesn't make the linode community (and thus, by extension, linode itself) look good.

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

The forums seem abandoned outside of particular topics (new kernels and beta tests), so about the only thing I can fault the OP for is posting the request here instead of sending it to Linode directly.

(For what it's worth, it's a good idea; a good hardware firewall can run circles around iptables capability-wise. Then again, I'm not paying $200/mo, so it'd probably just be iptables.)

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/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */

I did read it and people weren't listening to what he was saying and kept trying to convince him of other ways to do it which isn't what he wanted. You were part of the trolling as well so I'm sure you see it differently.

He wanted a separate physical firewall managed in the Linode manager, end of story if you don't agree with it than so be it but don't troll the guy.

Myself, and many other Linode employees, read every single topic and every reply. I often keep my mouth shut because you guys do a much better job regulating and can call it like it is more than I feel I'm able to.

As for this request, like all requests, we appreciate it and will discuss it

Thanks!
-Chris

Clearly not, or you would have seen where OP claimed to be the recipient of "insults" well before he was.

Wow. You have a very odd definition of "troll". I was laughing at the other people (I never responded to the OP at all), and put a silly joke about peanuts. That's so far away from trolling that it's not even in the same universe.

You, however, might be a troll.

_________________
Rgds

Stephen

(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

So much for the "Excellent Linodians" kissing.

James

I am the OP.

I am sorry for the confusion and insults. I assumed this would be a logical, simple request.

I know one can run their own DNS, load balancer, firewall, and everything with various linodes. Though there are good reasons to have dedicated, separate services offered by a provider for things like this.

Apologies and happy hacking,