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Re: contemplating SonicWall purchase


On Jun 7, 2006, at 2:52 PM, Dan Shoop wrote:

In the strictest sense, this is entirely true. However, a typical overworked LAN administrator is not going to understand the finer details of every system they administer.

Then theirs a strong argument here for doing a poor job. I'm not belittling then guy in over his head, but it's no way to run things. If you don't understand what you're doing your organization needs to either train you, replace you, or augment you with additional resources. Two of those three things you can work with your management on fixing, and if you don't then it ends up as the remainder.

I couldn't disagree more. Are you saying that for my 50-person company, I and/or one of my two staff need to know absolutely every single little nuance of SMTP, Unix, PHP, TCP/IP, circuit design, Kerberos, SQL (every implementation), shell scripting, VOIP, power regulation, SNMP, AFP, perl, ethernet (at all layers), IMAP, C++, and so on and so on and so on? I work with all of those, but I admit: I do not know every single thing about any of them. Should my little non-profit fire me? Only big enterprise can afford to hire enough people to have a dedicated e-mail administrator, a dedicated security admin, etc. In every other case (other than consultants who specialize in a particular niche), one has to choose one's battles.

I do think that security is one thing worth learning a LOT about. But even so, I am not going to learn the particulars of every kind of attack and every kind of possible defense. Not if my company wants any other technologies to be maintained.

Why should they? "If you gotta ask..." If you don't understand One- To-One NAT how could you even envision deploying it? If you don't understand CIDR blocks how can you configure them? If you don't understand VLANs then trying to configure them will make no sense. However there are plenty of adjunt materials you could use to answer these questions. And if in doubt, every SonicWall purchase comes with installation support. They'll help you set it up. It's even worth calling them if you were able to set it up yourself just to confirm the configuration and best practices for your set up.

One has to learn sometime. Since one will be implementing a particular system, it is not unreasonable to learn how to do it from the makers of that system. Again, it's not at all necessary, but it is awfully helpful. And it also speaks to the paradigm of the company producing the device/docs. If the docs are utterly arcane, then that is usually a clear sign that the device requires very deep understanding in order to manage properly.

How often does one need to fiddle with their border gateway networking equipment? If you find yourself constantly managing these you have a greater problem.

Exactly. I found myself constantly managing my SonicWall (either because of my poor understanding of their paradigm or because of it glitchy firmware... most likely a bit of both). In contrast, I never, ever touch my ZyXel except to open a new port for a new service or to update firmware when my calendar reminds me to.
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References: 
 >contemplating SonicWall purchase (From: Charles Yeomans <email@hidden>)
 >Re: contemplating SonicWall purchase (From: Ed Pastore <email@hidden>)
 >Re: contemplating SonicWall purchase (From: Ed Pastore <email@hidden>)



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