IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

At Nutmeg Consulting corporate headquarters (haha, that makes me laugh – I don’t know entirely why), when we hooked ourselves up to Comcast Internet service for business, we decided we wanted to manage our own firewall and routing services. So we disabled all of the features on the modem Comcast provided for us and installed a Sonicwall TZ170W. When we decided we wanted a VPN, we upgraded to the Enhanced OS for the Sonicwall so that we could use L2TP/IPSec tunnels for our VPN on Windows desktops without having to install the Sonicwall Global VPN Client. Well the Sonicwall has been restarting itself multiple times a day. We have called Sonicwall tech support and we have our support incident elevated all the way to level 3. However, 3 months later, the damn thing still reboots itself all the time and its “still at level 3 tech support”. I’m not happy with the level of service here.

The Level 2 tech wanted data directly from the console link. Supposedly, this gives them more information than what the Sonicwall is capable of logging on its own. The Sonicwall tech support assured us that our Sonicwall TZ170w did ship with a console cable (it didn’t). Sonicwall wasn’t going to send us one; they just insisted that ours shipped with the cableand it was up to us to find it. We actually had to contact a Sonicwall reseller we know (BNA Computing) and Kevin over there was kind enough to ship us an extra he had. I should mention at this point that we had 4 brand new Sonicwalls in our office that we were configuring for a client and none of them had a console cable with them either.

Just so happens earlier this month I went up to the Astaro Corporation US Headquarters in Burlington, MA. I’d been talking to my area sales director, Colin Martin, and it turns out that not only did we go to the same high school, we graduated the same year! I hadn’t seen him since I was 17, it was great to meet up with him again. So as I was talking about a potential project for one of my clients, this issue with our own Sonicwall came up. He offered a demo unit so I could take a look at the Astaro for my own office. What are the odds that we went to high school together? Haha… it was fun. I actually found out about Astaro through the Security Now podcast.

So far, I like the ASG a lot. Its flexible, has a lot of features, and the interface, though a bit complicated, is much better than the Sonicwall interface. I feel like I have more power! haha. And the ASG came with the console cable! :)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Adventures in IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.