I manage quite a few Safe@Office boxes for clients, and there are a couple of basic changes in the GUI that would make my life massively happier, maybe they could be considered in a future release?

Enable/Disable Logging
In the rulebase, you can enable/disable a rule by clicking on the icon under the "Enabled" column.

On the other hand, if I want to enable/disable logging, I have to make at least 7 clicks to do so.

Disabling/enabling a rule is something I do very rarely. On the other hand, enabling/disabling logging is a frequent occurrence.

When I was first learning to work with firewalls, I was taught that if you couldn't work out what was happening, log every rule and start from there. If I wanted to do that with 10 rules, it would take me 70 clicks (and drive me insane).

Seems like it would be an easy fix to make the "Log" icon clickable like the "Enabled" column.

Rule Order
I like to keep my rulebase organised logically so it is easy to see what they are all doing. I normally have inbound rules at the top, outbound rules under than, VPN rules under. I normally have the firewall set to block all traffic and then specify all rules - this is a hangover from my FW1 days.

In some sites where we are running multiple servers on multiple static NAT'd IPs, this can mean 30+ rules.

If I create a new rule and want it to be at the top, I have to click the "up" button 30 times. Also, as 30 rules don't fit on the screen at once, I have to wait for the rules to refresh after each change, then scroll down and click, wait for refresh etc.

Sonicwall firewalls have the ability to take any rule and give it a number in the rulebase. In my example, if I took the newly created rule and promoted it to number 4, the rule at number 4 already would drop down to #5, and all rules under that would just go down one.

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I know these are only small changes compared to the things I am seeing coming out in new revisions (source based routing, selective NAT etc), but they would go a long way to making me a happier Safe@Office admin.

Take a look at firmware 8.0 (Early Availability), you might be surprised :)

The SofaWare Team