firewall adventures
posted by Nick Bonadies
on May 16, 2008 at 09:45 PM
filed under: Developers
Nick Bonadies
IT Specialist : Boston
topics: Ruby on Rails, Software, Rock and Roll, PHP, and Microsoft
filed under: Developers
Having three offices offers unique challenges for ianw
and i. like making three offices, which are geographically in very different parts of the country, act like they are one office in the same internal network. mostly we have a pretty awesome setup; we have this great thing called a private wan. in reality its just a couple t1’s between each office that all act like one network, neat eh? one thing that isn’t so neat is all the routing that we need to manage between said sites. back in the olden days of our network, it was decided that every city should have its own subnet, which is great for the different cities because it offers pretty much an unrestricted number of IP addresses for all the crazy gizmo’s that barbarians like to hook up to the internet.
anyway, today all that was destroyed by one or all of our firewalls. luckily ian and i are pretty smart dudes and found a way to route traffic, but &*& !@#$, i wanted to kill someone. namely our firewall vendor. OK so we pay for support, and OK we don’t pay for the best support, but we still pay for them to help us.
here’s how it all went down. our support license was running out, so being the good little IT guy that i am i ordered the upgrade for our license a month in advance of its lapse. The update keys came, new license files were made, and all life was amazing. i made sure to ask my rep if there would be downtime when updating licenses, and he assured me that all would be well and the box wouldn’t even need a restart!!
and then…. nothing. see you later days of a wonderfully working network. goNE!!!!!
but then i thought, ah the easy thing would be to go back in time! yes, lets do that. so i reverted the software to the backup version that i made right before i applied the license. and to my horror, it reverted the license, but the box still doesn’t work the way it was before i applied the updated license.
UPDATE: We got everything working normally again. then one of our UPS’s quit this weekend. its so much fun when all of technology revolts against you at the same time.
