New firewall setup

We've moved our firewall duties over to a Cisco router with security features from our old ISA2006 server. It was getting clunky, buggy, and ridiculous. While this new method of ACLs is slightly more complex, it definitely won't have the issues the ISA server had. We're still maintaining our use of ISA for internal stuff, like the web proxy, and we'll be setting it up for DMZ usage as well, eventually. Silly Cisco router can only have 3 FA ports...even though it has the physical capability to run 6 (2 onboard & 2 twin-port cards). Odd that Cisco would do that...I guess force people into the higher-end routers. (yeesh...base 2801 is $3500...then add on some WICs...up around $4500 or more!)

While it'd be great to run it all off the router, we've already gone over our budget with the SAN purchase, so it'd be best not to press our luck.

It's actually quite nice, this setup. I'm looking forward to getting some info from our Cisco guy on proper ACL setup. I learned it back in college, but that was over three years ago, and I haven't touched any of it since then...gets rusty after a while.

It's a shame Terago was awful about all this. They eventually helped us out, but their level 1 techs are expert stonewallers, and not-so-expert networking professionals. Thank goodness our Cisco guy has dealt with these situations before - he was a real champ! What should have been a 1-2 hour job turned into a 3-4-5 hour job, mostly waiting on Terago to call us back. And then, once they had performed the fix we needed, a typo set us back again! 248 mask is different than a 240 mask.... took us a few to figure out why our VPN on 26 wasn't working, but everything below 24 was working. Sheesh!

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