What is the best appliance you've used? [closed]

Post your favorite appliances or "all-in-one" programs. Whether it runs in a virtual machine, or on its own hardware, it all goes.

My submission is Untangle. It's an open source network gateway (their term). Essentially, it can run a plethora of things that you may otherwise end up buying another appliance for:

  • Web filtering
  • logging
  • mail spam filtering
  • phishing monitor
  • spyware blocking
  • VPN

You name it, it's all there. Best of all, it's mostly free. A few appliances have annual costs due to inherent licensing or subscription costs. If you are looking for a new network perimeter device, definitely check it out.

The underlying OS doesn't matter, because it's the application we want to praise, not the OS beneath it.


Solution 1:

I didn't use that many appliances, but of the few I used I liked pfSense.

Solution 2:

I really like mailcleaner - great spam filtering "appliance" that is easy to configure and opensource.