> My intention was for it to be much more friendly in tone.
Unfortunately, most of us do not have sufficient mastery of the written word to convey tone via what is an essentially tone-free medium. Writing is free of nuances such as emphasis, inflection, intonation, physical cues, &c., which render it almost useless in conveying opinion and emotion, but well suited for transferring facts and figures.
Consider the classic case of "I didn't say he stole money." In the spoken medium this sentence can have six distinct meanings simply by repeating the sentence six times and placing the emphasis on each word, beginning with the first, "I", and ending with the last, "money." With the spoken emphasis, the meaning is clearly discernable in each variation. In written form, especially without added punctuation and enhanced presentation, it is lifeless and its meaning can be derived only from context and through the influence of the reader's subjective mode of interpretation.
In other words, when dealing with the written word, especially in an environment such as a forum where people are not professional writers and are often not writing in their native tongue, which is to say they lack the time and/or skills to convey tone through the pen, electronic though it might be, it is the well-advised soul who gives careful consideration to their interpretation, tending to favor diminishing rather than magnifying perceived threats and slanders and malignments of all sorts.
That said, in a practical sense, experts in most subject areas, and notably those in highly specialized fields, and most notably those in newly developing disciplines, are prone to examine truth from the perspective of the worst case scenario and to espouse good and proper solutions in the context of the best case environment. To wit, I was once in the employ of a large company who fell prey to designing products and solutions only for their premiere customers, that 10% who generated 50% of the revenue. While their solutions were appropriate for the few who deployed systems across dozens or hundreds of sites and hundreds or thousands of users, they were grossly inappropriate for the 90% of the customer population who had one or two locations and a small cadre of users.
SME is directed towards the 90%, where the employment of separate servers for application services and firewall features is impractical for various and sundry reasons. The risks associated with the merged solution are acceptable, and therefore the "textbook" application of security, typically that bit of truth established to define how a best case environment should deal with a worst case scenario, does not apply. Outside of the speculative realm of theoretical application and hypothetical projection lies an area known as the real world, where compromises are mandated and risks are accepted, often for reasons seemingly inappropriate in the view of the experts. Often these experts, when moved from the infinite expanse of the theoretical universe and placed into the finite confines of the practical world, find their truths and solutions to be just so much time and paper.
To the 10% who can afford the everything-and-then-some approach I say, "More power to you."
Everyone else must find the solution that is appropriate for their needs, even if it is lesser by comparison.
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