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| Yoggie Pico Personal Review |
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Page 4 of 6 Using The Yoggie Pico After installation, you are left with a small tray application for managing the Yoggie Pico Personal. From here, you can change the tray application's password, disable the Yoggie, or access its management console. Being able to password protect the tray application has one important use, at least for a system administrator. It keeps unauthorized individuals from bypassing or disabling the Yoggie Pico Personal. The Yoggie Pico Personal's management console is somewhat similar to what you would expect to see with most home routers, being a web application served up by the device itself. This management console has its own separate password protection as well, allowing you to choose who has access to it. During initial access to the console, you are guided through a simple 4 step installation wizard. It prompts you to choose your language, enter your registration information, and set up the password for management console access.     After finishing the initial setup, you are greeted with a rather attractive flash based console interface. It is designed with gauges that indicate your overall risk level, counters for firewall events, Intrusion Detection System events, and malware events. Proceeding further, you can see charts that break down the monitored activity into respective categories, though we are left scratching our heads as to how useful a 3d chart is in telling you what is actually going on. Thankfully, more detailed information is available in the Security Log and System Log sections. The System Log monitors update activity to the unit itself. Here we saw a curious regression in update versions, at least according to the unit's date/time stamps.      The goal of the Yoggie Pico Personal is to keep things simple, as you can see in the settings section. There are 3 prearranged security scenarios. They are creatively named: high, medium, and low. You can also set customized security settings. By clicking the advanced button, you can enable web filtering by genre or category. You cannot filter manually or via things like a block list. The Pico apparently only scans http:// protocol downloads for malicious code up to a 10mb size limit, so you are given the option to block all downloads above this limit. This appears to be a rather drastic way to overcome such a limitation. The protocols section allows you to enable or disable scanning of specific protocols such as SMTP, POP3, HTTP or FTP. We think this is a somewhat limited subset of protocols to manage, even if they are obviously the most common ones.     The IDS/IPS Policy Section allows you to enable or disable the unit's IDS Policy. You may decide whether to allow, block, or log a myriad of different types of common network activity based on your specific needs. The network section shows you the 172.x.x.x private network range utilized by the Yoggie Pico. It allows you to configure customized proxy settings, should you need them, for your particular home, home/office, office, or mobile office access needs.   The Support section includes useful system information that might be needed during a support call for the device. You can shut down or restart the unit as well as generate support documents for Yoggie.com. Manual updates, should automatic updates fail or be blocked or unavailable in a specific scenario, can be applied here as well. With the diagnostics tab, you can initiate a basic status test of the unit with a mouse click. Initiation of basic pings and trace routes are simple. There is also a simple virus test. You can download a harmless text file designed to trigger the unit's virus protection, insuring that it is working properly. Finally, the help section gives you a few links to documentation and support from Yoggie.     It is clear, after walking through the device's configuration and settings options, that it is deliberately simplified. Considering the target market, that being the roaming mobile business professional, this is understandable. Managing one's personal security is hard enough when you are not accessing the net in random hotel rooms and coffee shops. Still, this oversimplified control and settings approach does shift a lot of the decision making burden to Yoggie. Also, for an IT department administrator responsible for managing a deployment of these in the field, the available configuration options may seem too limiting or obtuse. |
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