Who is your Firewall Vendor Sonicwall is looking at some changes

Sonicwall, a longtime SMB Firewall Provider, is looking at a shakeup!

SonicWall, one of the larger SMB Firewall Providers is looking at being sold, to a different Firewall Provider, Watchgaurd. as per our sources here at Channel Insider

Is this good news, or not? Watchguard's reputation in the SMB Space has been declining in the past number of years, and an injection of new Sonicwall Customers would really boost their market share? But what of the quality of Sonicwall Support? It is already on shaky ground, having a number of SonicWall partners dropping their contracts with Sonicwall. Astro has been picking up a number of these Contracts as well!

Where does Sensible Gurus LLC Stand in this? We are a Fortinet partner, and have been very happy with our choice. If your company subscribes to our managed service plan, where we are on the hook to keep your systems safe, you already have a Fortigate Firewall in place!

Sensible Gurus

sales@sensiblegurus.com or
support@sensiblegurus.com
(414) 455-5455

Sensible Gurus LLC

15417 W National Ave Suite #63

New Berlin, WI 53151

FirePlotter, a Nice tool for monitoring Cisco Pix/ASA's and Fortigates!

I stumbled (well, was pointed to) this great tool:







For monitoring my Fortigate Firewalls! Now, I love my Fortigates, they are a great price point for Unified Threat and Decent Firewalling Rules, but the interface and monitoring tools built in could be LOADS better! Like anything it takes a while to get used to!

This FirePlotter tool has taken alot of pain out of monitoring traffic, there is a free and one year subscription paid version of the tool. The free tool will let you monitor some basic settings, such as Ping, FTP, SMTP, DNS, HTTP, PoP3, HTTPS, and RDP. This is great is you are searching for a Rogue Zombie on your network trying to flood e-mail's! (You ARE restricting all machine except for your designated mail Server to send traffice on Port 25, correct?)

The Paid version will allow for additional views, all traffic to be monitored and allows basic commands to be performed on the firewall such as Ping.

If you have a Fortigate or Pix/ASA, check this tool out, the paid version rocks, the free version is worth more than you pay for it!

Just what IP addresses do you need to exclude from your Google Analyitcs so you are not tracking yourself?

I was servicing one of my newer customers today, setting up their shiny new T1 line for their VoIP and Data traffic, it is a great upgrade for them. After a small confusion with the Telco as to where to plug in their Firewall (Not the Phone Switch, but rather the Netgear switch) their server hit my website (www.sensiblegurus.com) much much much quicker than before, Disconnected from my remote session and, case closed....
or was it?

About an hour later, I receive a call, Some PC's are not connecting to the web, or mail servers!

Turns out that all of their PC's had Static IP Addresses, with Static DNS. While the computers could connect to the Internet just fine, they could not resolve names. When asked why the PC's are running Static IPs, I was given the answer a) That is the way the old IT Consultant had it set up and b) so I could exclude the IP range from Google Analytics.

I took a quick glance at the already active DHCP Scope, increased it size, setup WINS and Domain name, and coached my customer that this is really the way to go, much better management of the network! Much easier to deal with than a spreadsheet or notebook remembering all your Static IP addresses.

We changed the computers to get their addresses via DHCP and Bam! They were browsing and downloading their e-mail like a champ! WOOOO!

I started to explain to the customer a bit about NAT (Network Address Translation) and how we don't need to exclude ALL the internal IP addresses at both of his locations, but rather just the external IP of the Firewall. NAT is a technology that allows multiple computers inside a network to share a single external (Public) IP Address. The Firewall, in NAT Mode, acts as a mini Proxy allowing traffic in and out, remembering where the traffic is going, and passing the relevant information back to the requesting computer! Some of the greatest benefits of NAT is the ability NOT to give each and every computer their own Public Internet Address, and NAT by itself does provide some protection to your computer (not nearly as powerful as a true firewall, that can work in conjunction with NAT) This is a very simple explanation on what NAT is,

The customer was happy he doesn't have to re-enter all the private IP addresses in his web page analytics anymore. Just his Public ones! I am happy that the customer is happy!

Takk!