Introduction

Update 8/15/2007: Corrected annual fee information.

The Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro is the second product I've reviewed for SmallNetBuilder that promises unified threat management (see D-Link DSD-150: Good idea, flawed implementation). The idea of the Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro is to take big enterprise information technology security and bring it painlessly to SOHO networks (and laptops) to provide UTM (Unified Threat Management).

Figure 1 shows you what comes in the box with a Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro. The manual is a 12 page double-sided map-folded brochure where each page is 4.5" by 4.5". You get an Ethernet cable and a CD with Version 1.03 of the Yoggie software setup program.

Figure 1: What you get

Figure 2: Front panel

The product shot above (Figure 2) shows the (extremely small) icons on the face of Yoggie. The blue LEDs on my evaluation unit were also very small. To monitor the LEDs on the Yoggie you need to keep the unit perpendicular to your angle of view. The SD activity LED seems to indicate something besides SD activity as the LED blinks pretty much constantly, even when an SD card is not in the Yoggie.

The back side of Yoggie has a rubber door covering the rear. On the left of Figure 3 is the recessed reset button. In the middle is the SD card port, used for recovering / restting your password (more on that shortly). Finally, on the right-hand side is a power port (the optional power adapter is $17.99 on Yoggie's web site).

Figure 3: Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro - back view

With double-sided hook-and-loop or duct tape, you can mount the Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro as a semi-fixed security appliance for a laptop. While this seems like an awkward way to protect your laptop, it could be an interesting way for IT departments to give back some user-friendliness while controlling risk. For example, by turning off the annoying Vista confirmation that Apple made its "Security" commercial about, while retaining a pretty robust list of security features that do not need to be installed in Vista.

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