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I finally hit the final straw with Sonicwall. Had to call them regarding SSL VPN client on a MAC. One hour on hold, an hour and forty-five minutes with first level support who was lucky he knew is name much less how to help me. Then up to second level who wanted to start from scratch. Asking me to update the firmware (I was only one behind) and upgrade the MAC to the latest version. Another forty-five minutes later with no real progress. I had to pull the plug because the user (One of the owners) needed to leave. I looked like an idiot. Three and a half hours to get SSL VPN working. I couldn’t in good conscience charge them for the time, so out the time and money. This is just the latest issue with Sonicwall. Not to mention if you turn on AV scanning on anything but their top tier units it practically dies. So it is time to find an alternative. My customers are typically SMB and need simple to manage with VPN and gateway AV scanning.
What are your thoughts?

@Cisco

13 Spice ups
2

Netgear ProSecure

Meraki (by Cisco)

Cyberoam

Watchguard

Palo Alto (if you have deep pockets)

6 Spice ups
3

Why? It’s their equipment not working, right? If you were internal IT, they’d be paying you to support it.

5 Spice ups
4

I’ve inherited a WatchGuard and it has performed well.

Also in agreement with SAM - no reason to not charge - you did work.

4 Spice ups
5

For ease of use I would also recommend watchguard.

1 Spice up
6

Sophos UTM

They give you the firewall bit for free and if you like that you can add on the bits you need

Runs as a VM

Or you can buy an appliance for all us old school folk who like firewalls with big letters by the LAN and WAN port so we don’t get confused

4 Spice ups
7

For one of our locations we recently switched from an entry level Juniper to the entry level Palo Alto PA-200. The Palo Alto is awesome, setup was a breeze, and we haven’t had any issues with the built-in VPN. We are using the PA VPN in combination with DUO Security’s 2-factor authentication and it’s been working very well. They say that you can enable every feature on the firewall, including AV, with practically no performance impact. We haven’t tried that yet but plan to enable more features within the next month. I think we got the PA-200 for under $2k.

1 Spice up
8

JUNIPER are good www.juniper.net

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The Barracuda Firewalls are awesome products, also with their hardware refresh program you get a brand new firewall every 4 years, no need to worry about older hardware on your rack. I highly recommend them.

As far as SAM’s comment on charging them, I see both sides of the argument, especially if you sold them the SonicWall, you would be justified in billing them as you did spend the time on their equipment, but they likely won’t be happy with the bill as the problem wasn’t resolved so to keep them happy you may want to just eat it. It is a difficult call to make on if to bill or not in situations like this.

10

Hey William! Glad to hear you’re enjoying Duo Security on your PA. Don’t mean to post-jack but it’s always great to see our customers “in the wild”. Cheers and have a happy new year!

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Another vote for Sophos.

The Astaro platform they inherited is rock solid designed for engineers by engineers. Easy to use, packed full of features, and does it all in one box. Support is killer (or rather, was, i assume it still is since Sophos historically has good support.)

Failing that you could try and schmooze Dell and see if you can escalate the case since they are the same company. It doesn’t fix the problem in the past but it should help going forward.

12

Try Cyberoam NGFW , they come at a competitive price, No Licensing on SSL VPN and is compatible with MAC and Windows. also for a smoother transition we have a conversion tool that would help you convert a sonicwall backup file to a cyberoam backup file.

https://migrate.cyberoam.com/ConfigMigration/webpages/login.jsp

also you can get a built in reporting tool, which is equal to embedding the view point inside the sonicwall firewall.

ngdemo.cyberoam.com

guest/guest

happy new year

1 Spice up
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Thank you all for your comments. I’ve built my business by being a straight shooter and because of that my referrals have helped be expand. I don’t mind eating some hours here and there to get loyal customers. It just pisses me off how bad Sonicwall support has gotten. I will look at the suggestions posted. Thanks again.

1 Spice up
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Welcome to the wonderful world of Dell, Dell support is horrible and brings down the support of every company they buy.

1 Spice up
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I’d suggest looking into the Netgear Prosecure UTM line. Really a lot of bang for the buck.

16

love our new fortigate!

17

Thought I’d comment on the time & money aspect of OP’s question. If I have to study something and learn about a tech that a client needs, I would never charge for this time. If the tech the client is using is finicky, and the settings are more complicated than it should be, etc… then I always charge for this time. This reflects the actual ROI of the product the client decided to go with. It may have cost them less upfront, but seems to always bite them when it comes time to support it.

For what it’s worth, we have a Watchguard XTM, and setting up SSL VPN to authenticate to our RADIUS server was a piece of cake. But then again, we paid a pretty high upfront cost for the device. Watchguard also has an internal user/group database, so RADIUS is not needed.

1 Spice up
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Obviously that’s your call but I’d be charging…

There’s nothing else you can be doing in that time so you are dedicated to supporting them.

If it turns out you were a clot and screwed up, and it should only have taken an hour, i.e. all the extra time was your own fault, then I’d obviously only charge them for the hour, but otherwise you were working for them and would expect to get paid.

I would also have balked at upgrading the Mac (not MAC, pet peeve, that stands for Media Access Control) and asked them for supporting documents showing it needed to be upgraded in order to work.

19

We dumped ours. Fortigate support was incompetent and finding a vendor who was knowledgeable with the product - you’d have better luck finding Santa’s workshop. But good luck. Hope your experience is better than ours was.

20

The big list:

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/328301-best-of-firewalls

3 Spice ups