I mentioned a while ago about there being a new version of the Linux firewall OS, Smoothwall. It is currently in beta, but I downloaded it this morning as I needed to put a quick none production use firewall in place.

The current stable release of version 2 wouldn’t install on my test machine (a dell optiplex GX270), but the Beta of version 3 went on no problems. After swapping a network card in the pc that was faulty I could connect to the box.

The new interface is very slick, I like the new navigation system, very easy to find your way round and gives lots of information. All the network usage stats were very cool. You can now also update the snort rules from the browser without an add on. I pointed my browser at its proxy (i’ve never used it as a proxy server before, it runs on port 800) and I could surf no problem.
I couldn’t find out if I could authenticate users on the proxy or not (we have been told we now have to log all internet traffic with a user name against it), but ill pose that question in the forums.

All in all I think the full release should be well worth the wait

Found quite a cool thing recently, that means you can have optional parameters in a SQL stored procedure.
This means you can pass the options into the procedure if you have some, or if none are passed get the SP to use some defaults instead. It took a while to get the syntax correct, but its fairly straight forward, in this example we will use the year and month as optional parameters:

@year int = NULL, @month char(20) = NULL
AS

if ISNULL (@year, 0) = 0
begin
SELECT @month = DATENAME(month, GETDATE())
SELECT @year = DATENAME(year, GETDATE())
end

First of all we declare the 2 variables, then we check if the first one is NULL (nothing passed). If it is then we set both the month and year to be the current month and year. Simple but effective!

I have another article published at aspfree.com, this one is about creating a simple RSS feed using ASP.net, written in c#. Read it HERE