26.4. How Long Does It Take?
As we've said, the hardest part of maintaining your firewall is
keeping yourself up to date. How long does it take to keep up to
date? If you're a novice at this, just getting started and at
the hardest part of the learning curve, keeping up to date can easily
occupy you full time. After you've been at it for a few weeks
or months, and you've learned the fundamentals of what you need
to know, your time requirement can drop off to just an hour or so a
day to follow the various mailing lists, newsgroups, magazines, and
other sources that you've decided to track.
ost of this time will be devoted to maintaining your own knowledge,
not maintaining the firewall itself. Monitoring the firewall itself
should take only minutes a day -- long enough to scan the daily
log summaries and make sure that nothing unusual or noteworthy has
happened.
Obviously, you're occasionally going to have to devote more
time to the firewall when it's time to fix something, upgrade
something, or add new functionality. How long this takes depends on
how complex the fix, upgrade, or addition is. The better job
you've done anticipating your site's needs and designing
and building the firewall in the first place, the less time
you're going to spend adapting your firewall to changes. Many
sites find that they need to update their firewall only about once
every few months. The rest of the time, it sits in the corner just
humming along.
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26.3. Keeping up to Date | | 26.5. When Should You Start Over? |