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I work for DoD now doing the same type of work, but I’ve not seen any outgoing traffic from standard MS installs and one of the very first things we install on our systems are 3rd party software firewalls that track all outgoing packets. The DoD is now making windows systems their “standard” operating systems as a matter of fact, which has been going very well. But there are plenty of other choices out there, FreeBSD as you said (I won’t use “the Rat’s” OpenBSD version after his comments about our military which caused his DoD funding to get jerked). If you think Solaris is slow you should really check out the new “Indiana” version of OpenSolaris, fastest version of Unix for Intel I’ve ever used, even in a VM.

Yeah...the "Rat" could have used just a little discretion. I can't integrate his OS into a production environment with them expecting the end user to essentially rebuild the OS from sources. They'll never end up getting any sizeable usage audience. Besides, FreeBSD does everything OpenBSD does.

I understand what you're saying about third party firewalls, but those firewalls MUST use the APIs that MS provides them. I've used those APIs before and it's like programming through a "keyhole". You're left with the definite impression that there's more available then what they're giving you, or worse...what you might be "giving" somebody else. I don't trust them, and they give me no good reason to trust them.

I might try OpenSolaris, but we've been running Debian Linux on all of our custom application servers, and RedHat Enterprise 4 on those that aren't custom. The Sparc 64 port of Debian loads up on my older Netra T1-105s, E250s and E220s in the lab, but "looks" like the same Debian Linux that runs on the Intel based servers.

But thanks for letting me know about OpenSolaris! :-)