The Dell/Sonicwall NSA 3600 arrived. A very serious-looking piece of kit. 1U bay about 20 inches deep. A dozen copper 1 Gb/s Ethernet ports. Four copper 10 Gb/s Ethernet ports. A couple of optical ports. Fan that sounds like a wind tunnel until it realizes that it doesn’t need to blow that hard to keep the box cool. Makes the NSA 250M look like a toy.
I exported the configuration file from the NSA 250M, powered up the bew firewall, logged on to it, and couldn’t log in as administrator because I didn’t know the default password, so I started the configuration wizard and changed it. Then I tried to bail out of the wizard, but it told me that none of my changes would be saved. So I went through the wizard, lying my head off about the configuration, knowing I was going to change it.
I uploaded the new configuration, logged on to the firewall, and looked around. Most of the dashboard apps were not working, but I figured that would change when I transferred over my licenses.
I shut down the new and the old firewall, replaced the old with the new in the rack, plugged in the Ethernet cables, and powered the new box up. Then I went upsatirs and tried to load a web page. It popped right up. Whew!
I navigated over to Verizon’s speed test site and ran a measurement:
Looking good, for a 50 Mb/s connection. I never saw those speeds with the old firewall.
Can S3 support transfers at that rate? I opened S3 Browser and gave it some big files:
40 Mb/s net speed. Yes!
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