Will Wingate fulfill these email and monitoring requirements

[clinthammer]

I am the IT Manager for a medium sized advertising agency. We have approx 12 PC's and 2 MAC's. The all currenctly connected to the Internet securely via a Cisco pix 515e firewall.

Also behind the firewall is a NAS and IBM backup server.

Currently we use MS Outlook and MS Entourage for our mail software. Our email server is connected to via pop3 hence we cannot monitor what emails people send/receive.

Can Wingate do this (enterprise edition):

1. Monitor all www related activity and record sites/downloads by each internal ip of a user
2. Act as the main email server within our office. It will download all emails to the server and client machines will grab it accordingly. Client machines will also send emails thru the wingate server.
All emails send/received can be copied to the administrator

A few notes:
1. Cisco pix will still be the main firewall. Wingate will be installed on the IBM server and connected to the PIX. Only the wingate machine will be authorized to access the Internet thru the Cisco PIX. Hence the gigabit network adapter on the wingate machine will be the internet point for internal client machines

2. The Cisco pix firewall does not allow internal users to access it via public ip. e.g. Our public ip set on the cisco is 80.11.11.11. I have a domain name linked to this so that I can access our storage box from home. However, the domain name cannot be used from within the office (where the firewall is) because is translated to our public ip and cisco does not allow this.

So if the PIX firewall is used in conjunction with Wingate server, how can I allow users to send/recieve emails if they are travelling without making any changes? Because when they are in the office they have one setting in outlook to get emails (e.g. 192.168.0.1 being the ip of the wingate machine) and when they are outside they have to change it.

Thanks,
CD

[adrien]

Hi

1. Monitor all www related activity and record sites/downloads by each internal ip of a user

Yes, WinGate's WWW proxy will log all requests, and the log entries contain client IP address. Alternatively you can set up user accounts in WinGate (either get your users to authenticate, or assume who they are based on their IP), and enable auditing per user, which creates a file per user of all their activity.

2. Act as the main email server within our office. It will download all emails to the server and client machines will grab it accordingly. Client machines will also send emails thru the wingate server.
All emails send/received can be copied to the administrator

WinGate has POP3 collection built in, so you can get it to download the mail, which users then retrieve from WinGate. You can get WinGate to store a copy of all processed mail (goes into the Sent folder in WinGate). Also, you could get your clients to use IMAP instead of POP3, which means the mail is stored on the server as well.

As for the domain name issue, there is a workaround for that. For instance, if your internal clients use WinGate as their DNS server when they are in the office network, you can add an entry to the hosts file on the WinGate machine which would map the domain name normally associated with the PIX firewall's external IP to the internal IP of the WinGate server. Then when they are on the office network, the lookup for the external name will resolve to the internal IP, which they can connect to, and when they go home, and presumably use a different DNS server at their ISP, the same name will map to the external IP of the PIX firewall. You then would map the port through to the WinGate server from the PIX firewall.

regards

Adrien

[clinthammer]

Thanks Adrien.

1. I am actually using the 30 day demo now and the monitoring is working well so far. Had aproblem with a large download so working on that.

2. Will give the hosts file trick a shot soon. Am travelling on vacation to FLorida in 2 days so have to finalize some other matters.

SO for the next three weeks, a few of my users machines will be guinea pigs for the Wingate demo test hehe - they will be depending on the Wingate machine for their internet access.

Thanks,
CD

[clinthammer]

So far wingate demo has been running fine. Ive been monitoring it by VPN from florida.

Just one more question though - every month I will have this big history report (History tab) of all Internet activities. How can I output it to a proper report (electronic format) showing total usage by each user or IP?


Thanks,
CD

[adrien]

Hi

You can export the History file to comma-delimited text, which can be imported into excel.

Or there are a number of third-party log analysis tools that you can use to generate reports directly from WinGate's log files. A popular one is ProxyInspector for WinGate, at http://www.advsoft.ru

Regards

Adrien