My testing did not scale high enough to verify the vendor's claim that the R3000 can block more than 99 percent of unwanted Web traffic up to 80 Mbps. But I did attain a peak of 38 Mbps (well exceeding 1,000 transactions per second) in HTTP requests alone, with an overall block rate of 99.83 percent. It's surprising that the appliance performed so well on our network, considering that it had less than 1 ms to intervene.
Despite the R3000's filtering efficiency, I discovered that when the WebAvalanche sent HTTP requests to our forbidden test servers--simulating a load of more than 50 simultaneous users per second--the block pages loaded extremely slowly or timed out. When the rate was doubled, block pages ceased to load. 8e6 reps said the problem was the block page, which is sent by a light Apache Web server and contains a redirect link back to the R3000. When I configured the redirect to access another site, however, block pages were still delivered slowly and clients continued to time out.
I also set up 8e6's ER3 (Enterprise Reporter 3.0) appliance to report on the R3000's monitoring and blocking activities. The ER3--$6,995 for 1,000 users--is necessary for fine-tuning filtering rules based on observed traffic. That seems pricey, but together with the R3000, the cost is only about $17 per user annually.
Once the network configuration is set, you can contact 8e6 to receive a set of URL libraries, which is updated automatically each day. With the libraries loaded, the box is ready to filter HTTP, IM and NNTP by IP address ranges.
If creating custom profiles by IP is too cumbersome, you can configure the R3000 to block by users or groups in Active Directory, an LDAP directory or an NT Domain. The product lets you modify profiles to allow or block URLs by category. There are more than 75 categories, ranging from pornography and hate groups to drugs and weapons.
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