Pieter, Some thoughts... It goes with out saying .. but be careful of the 'gholfers'. After all, they are golfing and you are not. :)
Make sure you know the direction that they want and Why they want it. Then you can try to cater to it. Know what YOU want. Know what you can live with. Make SURE you don't come across as someone who just doesn't want to maintain the current system. In the case of the firewall .. Make some very good points why they need to replace what they have. They probably have deep enough pockets. And, technology that is 4 years old is usually ripe for replacement if it can be justified. You need to come up with the justifications. Also .. can you harden/upgrade what you have? Kinda like remodling the house by building 3 new walls, then kicking down the 4th one, because it was in the way. Know what your own environment is like. Cheap or Expensive .. try to show managerment you know what you are doing. some total cost of ownership figures .. How much now, Who to maintain, How much training, How difficult to support. As you probably know, the top names are Checkpoint FWl-1, raptor, pix, netscreen. You probably want to pick two and bring them into your shop for evaluation. You might even show modern BSD systems. You want to see how good the product is. At times management may want to know how the marketing team wants to support you and your company. If you are an IBM shop .. perhaps look into having IBM as a 'tiger' team. etc. Here you can spend money like water. In the case of Sendmail vs Lotus Domino .. they probably wanted more function than Sendmail and perhaps you have no Unix people. -Steve _______________________________________________ Firewalls mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnac.net/mailman/listinfo/firewalls
