Yoggie Bears Its Burden Well – Better Than Your Average Firewall

I loved the idea of the Yoggie as soon as I heard it: a portable, hardened Linux-based appliance for laptop and PC security. The Yoggie is a killer firewall built on the “air-gap” concept, plus antivirus, plus other protections against spam, Trojan horses, phishing, spyware, and intrusions in general, not to mention a web and FTP proxy. Phew! It’s a dream come true for a security geek like me. For this evaluation, I paid $220 dollars for the device plus $7 shipping.

DreamerGear Evaluation

Product Name: Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro 1.0.3

Company:Yoggie Security Systems http://www.yoggie.com/

Category: Endpoint Security – Security Appliance

Uses: Protecting laptops and small networks

What We Loved: Offloading security to a separate hardened appliance

What We Didn’t: A bit buggy and too easy to misplace or lose

Price: Starts at $220.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5

Beats ZoneAlarm and Windows Firewall

I tested the Yoggie thoroughly under real world power-user conditions and found that the security was stellar but some bugs during deployment keep me from throwing out my resident antivirus just yet. By stellar I mean that the Yoggie deflected every attack I could manufacture as deftly as Zone Alarm, plus it stopped viruses and spam before they hit my computer at all – an advantage over Zone Alarm. The installation was simple: plug the network cable from the wall into the Yoggie, then plug the Yoggie’s USB cable into any USB port. The Yoggie serves as firewall, FTP proxy, antivirus gateway, and overall intrusion blocker, and best of all, it permits the user to free up loads of memory and CPU cycles responsible for making most PCs drag. The Yoggie worked equally well when I was sitting at Starbucks connected to the T-Mobile Hotspot with the Yoggie only hanging off my USB port. Network throughput was exceptional, with no detectable slowdown in network response times. In fact, with the Yoggie handling antivirus scanning and my heavy desktop antivirus disabled, Internet response times actually increased. 

But Not Without A Little Disappointment

Unfortunately, my deployment was buggy enough to throw cold water on my enthusiasm for the time being. There were problems with the Yoggie holding onto the network connection, and some kind of conflict loading the Yoggie while connected to a docking station. In fact, during boot up, the Yoggie would cause my laptop to freeze just as the BIOS were loading. Yoggie support worked with me to isolate at least part of the problem to my computer’s USB power management, but I suspect more of the problem had to do with encryption services I have loading at boot time. Installing the optional client software did not entirely eliminate errors when restoring from hibernate mode. It’s luggable, but I’ll probably misplace it, lose it, or forget to bring it one of these days. It really ought to be a PC card or some other form factor that stays with the PC. I’d also like to see the price for consumers closer to $100.

Comments

[ls]

This market is changing quickly, ZoneAlarm and Checkpoint probably didnt say the final word up till now.

going in tradeshows shows there is a big competition between all the different companies who offering end point security, this probably will result in the future for companies to merge or disappear.

a solution such as the above that includes advanced good application firewall would be perfect.