SonicWALL Enhanced OS

Holy Moly! I went to configure a simple port-forwarding rule on a customer’s SonicWALL TZ200 today and entered into a whole world of hurt!

All I wanted to do was allow HTTP traffic into an internal web server – exceedingly straightforward on any device I’ve ever worked on before… not so under SonicOS Enhanced!

After about an hour of bizarrely confusing options I realised that one needs to create an address object for the internal server, create a NAT policy to allow access, and then create a firewall access rule. This doesn’t sound too bad except it wasn’t that simple in fact. To add to the confusion, I managed to create a NAT loop which killed the network! That was purely down to my own stupidity though!

So how did I get it to work? I gave in and used one of the wizards after looking at the following excellent post online: http://www.fuzeqna.com/sonicwallkb/consumer/kbdetail.asp?kbid=7027

Turns out the device needs THREE NAT policies (inbound, outbound, and loopback) plus address object, plus firewall access rule! What?!!

My advice: take your time with this OS and use the wizards unless you’ve got loads of experience with these devices.

Comments

Evolution MK-249C MIDI Keyboard Mac OS X Problem

Mac OS X generally seems capable of dealing with just about anything you can throw at it. However upon connecting my trusty Evolution MK-249C MIDI keyboard up to my 2nd generation MacBook it steadfastly refused to play ball. This keyboard has always been instantly recognised by Windows XP and so it was surprising to encounter this. The M-Audio website (M-Audio took over Evolution it appears) offered no real assistance. There was no driver available for Mac OS X 10.4.9 as the keyboard is supposed to be "Class Compliant" which apparently means it doesn't need one... strange. Eventually after consulting some forums I found the fix. The problem seems to be related to Mac OS on the Intel MacBooks. There is a patch on the M-Audio site but only for MacOS 10.1.5. This must be downloaded and installed. Here is the link: http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=support.drivers&f=596 Upon restarting the OS the keyboard was recognised by Mac OS and GarageBand had no trouble tal...

Copying NTFS Permissions with RichCopy

Microsoft's RichCopy is a fantastic tool for copying/moving files. It's multithreaded so moves things along quicker and has a nice log so you can see what's working and what's going wrong. It's kind of like a GUI on top of RoboCopy and you can get it here... However, I always forget that it doesn't copy file/folder NTFS permissions by default. This is what you need to do if you want permissions to copy across to the destination: - Click the "View" menu and then click on "Advanced". - Then click the "Option" button on the right below the "Source" and "Destination" buttons. - Click on "File attributes, Error Handling" - Tick the relevant boxes under the "Security information" section. Hope this helps.

XP Startup Issues - The Recovery Console

The Windows Recovery Console is a fantastically useful tool if you find yourself with a PC that will not boot Windows. There are many useful Windows startup tools such as Last Known Good Configuration and the many different flavours of Safe Mode but all of these rely on a bootable Windows system. System Restore is completely useless in this scenario since it relies on one being in Windows to use it. The kinds of things that could couse an unbootable Windows system could be: Corrupted boot files - e.g. NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM Corrputed Windows system files - NTOSKRNL.EXE, HAL.DLL The Recovery Console allows you to boot into an environment "underneath" that of your Windows installation (by using the Windows CD or by choosing it at boot time if you pre-installed it) and so you can perform major low level repairs to your Windows installation. Follow the link below to find out how to use the Recovery Console: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058/

Artifact Weblog

Search This Blog