StillSecure Cobia

Another free UTM that provides features such as routing, firewall, gateway anti-virus/spam and much more

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

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Cobia is another UTM which provides all the basic functionality, just like any other software based UTM. Apart from the anti-virus/spyware one can also find URL filtering, firewall, VPN etc.
The free version of Cobia is best suited for small or mid sized enterprises, because its configuration and deployment are pretty easy as compared to Endian or Untangle.

Like Endian, it has a web based configuration panel, which makes it easily configurable. Considering the options it provides, it can be good for remote offices, where the requirements are too specific, such anti-virus, anti-spam or URL filtering etc. The installation of Cobia is pretty easy, despite being a textual install process like Endian. Once the installation has been done, we logged in using admin credentials.

The dashboard shows the overview of the system very elaborately. It shows the total system uptime, average load, CPU usage, physical and virtual memory usage and so on. The GUI is very simple and even newbies can learn the process enabling services quickly as compared to Endian.

We used the same hardware that we used for the other UTMs, primarily the Harpertown server. The minimum hardware requirement for this is Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, 10 GB HDD space and 2 NIC. At first we did the anti-virus test. Here, it detected 89% of viruses, which is a good number. Compared to other UTMs in the shootout this number is pretty decent.

Next, we tested the anti-spam funtionality of this UTM for which the score was not as satisfying as others in this shootout. It detected 52% of the spam, which is an average score. This UTM doesn't have IDS or IDP in the free edition, which is a drawback. Then we manually tested the URL filtering option which is basically SQUID. It provides white and black list options only whereas the other two UTMs provide much more elaborative options for content filtering, such as categorized URLs. As we said earlier, it also has VPN capabilities. The configuration of VPN in this UTM is a bit tricky as it opens up the configuration file for configuring the VPN. And once you save that you need to download the client separately on the client machine and then use it. Overall, the UTM has basic options and as compared to others, it has less features.

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