How we tested ZyXel’s ZyWall 70

How we conducted the Clear Choice Test of ZyXel’s ZyWall 70 threat-management appliance.

We installed the ZyWall 70 UTM at a K-12 private school in Tucson, Ariz., replacing the school network’s existing firewall. The 200-user network did not have servers or a DMZ, so we simply used the appliance’s WAN and LAN ports. We set up a basic policy, including anti-virus, content-filtering, and access controls based on the school’s IP addresses and on time of day.

We also enabled remote management so that we could monitor the firewall and make configuration changes. Because the ZyWall 70 UTM keeps only the last 128 log messages, we didn’t get much information out of the logs. Although the appliance can send logs to a Syslog server, we didn’t enable that feature because we didn’t think that most small businesses would have a central log server.

We let the firewall run in place for three months, checking in every day to see if there were any problems with session limits or memory; changing policy if needed; and looking at the log snippets that were available.

Before putting the ZyWall 70 UTM into production, we tested policy routing, WAN failover, load sharing, and bandwidth-management features to verify that they all worked as advertised.

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