Certification Renewals

The first post on James new blog reminded me of something that i’ve been querying recently

I’ve been working with Sonicwall products for years. It started in my previous job so made sense to continue to use them when we started our company.

One of the things i did was to take the official training and pass the exam to become a Certified Sonicwall Security Administrator (CSSA)

The benefits for passing include (from the Sonicwall US site)

• Direct access to 2nd level Technical Support (based on regional availability) 
• Access to SonicWALL’s Online Forum (discussion group)
• Support Bulletins and advanced notifications
• Opportunities to participate in SonicWALL beta programs
• Certification newsletters
• CSSA logo usage

Now when i passed no-one told me i’d need to re-certify after a certain amount of time had passed but this turns out to be the case.

I tried to speak to 2nd level tech support but they refused to help as i “wasn’t on the list”

After speaking to our account managers at our distributor and with Sonicwall UK it was only recently we got a definate “yes you have to re-certify” answer

What annoys me is this,

Why should i have to take the same exam every year? (or every two years as it now looks)

If i was doing Microsoft certification i could do the training and pass the exams and become an MCSE

That certification would stay with me until the certification gets retired. Obviously if new products launch new exams come out but i don’t have to retake anything on a yearly basis

Am i complaining about nothing?

I think the sonicwall certification path should include a “re-certification” (or refresher) exam as currently someone taking the exam for the first time would do the same exam as someone who has needs to re-certify

Just my two-pence worth

Sonicwall Firewalls and Internet Explorer 7 – Part 2

Was having a poke around our Sonicwall management pages today and noticed a new version of firmware!

Finally!

Version 3.1.3.0s fixes the issues with pop-ups and Internet Explorer 7 i mentioned in my previous post on this

They appeared to have fixed it on all the major models.

I’ve uploaded the new firmware on our firewall (a PRO 2040) and it seems to be working without any user agent string changes

It’s worth reading through the release notes as it claims there are still some issues but i’ll post about these if/when i find them

Guess Whose Back?

—26/01/07 Correction to the post. It should read TICK the box instead of Clear— 

Back in the office today after a week on holiday. Work was so mad up until i left i didn’t get a chance to post much

I did mention in my last post that i had a problem getting WSUS clients to update.

I finally figured it out!

I had another look through the event log and found the following:

Event ID: 364     Source: Windows Server Update     Category: Synchronization

Content file download failed. Reason: The server does not support the necessary HTTP protocol. Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) requires that the server support the Range protocol header.Source File: /msdownload/update/v5/eula/officexpeula_fin.txt Destination File: e:\WSUS\WsusContent\115D075903CAA57C6F0A64061A2C596B8C601C311.txt.

The sync hadn’t downloaded the files for the updates. The reason i didn’t spot it before was my lack of understanding about WSUS. Since i could see all the updates in the console i initially dismissed this error. Turns out it downloads the details first (the definitions if you will) and then the actual files later.

After a little research it was the Sonicwall firewall that was giving me the problem.

To fix it i did the following

Login to the Sonicwall management webpage

Alter the URL so that you can get at the internal settings..e.g   http://192.168.0.1/diag.html

Find the “Enable HTTP Byte-Range request with Gateway AV” option and TICK the box (i initially was a little sceptical about this as we dont use the Gateway AV feature)

Click APPLY (I didn’t reboot the firewall but it might be a good idea to.)

After this the sync started working fine and the clients started installing updates as they were supposed to

I was annoyed that i had spent so much time trying to figure this one out but i was pleased that i managed to learn just about everything i’ll ever need to know about WSUS (until version 3!)

There is also a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on this. KB922330

And as if by magic..

No sooner had a posted about the issues i was having using Sonicwall firewalls with Internet Explorer 7 i received an email from Sonicwall with their take on the problem

Have a look here

To fix the problem they are going to be releasing new firmware for all their current (fourth) generation models

I was pleased to have received an official notice of this, even if it took a little while (how long was IE7 in beta for?!)

Only thing i find a little strange is their workaround until the firmware release

(1) remove IE 7.0 and downgrade to IE version 6.0 or

(2) use Mozilla’s Firefox as an alternative browser

They don’t mention anywhere the user agent string utility mentioned in my previous post

It’s not that important i guess as the firmware release will sort everything out…

No details though as to when the firmware is to be released!

** Updated on 19/03/2007 **

This has been fixed!

Read my new post here

Sonicwall Firewalls and Internet Explorer 7

In my post about the full release of Internet Explorer 7i said that i was only using it on the laptop as i was worried about not being able to use it with the Sonicwall firewalls we use.

I decided to do a little bit more investigation into this a felt like i’ve been missing out!

A quick look on the microsoft IE newsgroup indicates that the firewall runs a script called BrowserCheck.js when it opens the pop-up window.

Basically this means that the firewall is expecting Internet Explorer 6 so just does nothing when it encounters version 7.

This gives me two options

1) Wait for Sonicwall to upgrade the firmware to support IE7

2) Make the sonicwall think i’m using IE6

I’m going to take the second option i think

Microsoft provide the “User Agent String Utility” on their download site for this

When you run the utility it gives you the option to report the site to Microsoft so “they can help improve” Internet Explorer. I didn’t see the point in doing this as Microsoft wouldn’t be able to browse to the firewall interface. Next you get a new Internet Explorer window with some text added at the end of the title to let you know it’s in compatibility mode. Any tabs you create in this instance will report itself as Internet Explorer 6

It all worked fine even if i did fine the solution a little clunky

Also found some registry files on the Fiddlertool site that changes the user agent string as needed. These changes are more permanent but it’s a preference thing in the end.

So this means i’ll be upgrading my main pc to the latest version!

** Updated on 19/03/2007 **

This has been fixed!

Read my new post here