Tomorrow night, at 8pm, I do my first firewall maintenance at a client before the 3rd Party (banking institution) they’re trying to interact with, go into change-freeze at the end of the week…
It’s one thing to sit in the office and do changes where you can (hopefully) reverse them or ask for some advice from a colleague before committing the changes to the firewall. It’s an entirely different story to be at a client with them looking over your shoulder while you ‘tinker’ with their firewall.
What makes this particular change even more nerve-wracking is that the client cannot really explain the changes that I need to make to me upfront… we’re sort of winging it, trying to get something to work.
Hopefully it’s not too big a job. I need to route traffic from one network to another over two Microsoft ISA servers… how hard can it be? :(
I know I’m starting to. And I haven’t consciously recalled a dream since about 18 years ago.
My head is filling up with terminology and jargon, from both the Checkpoint Firewall-1 side of things and our own internally developed monitoring systems that we deploy at client sites.
This morning, I woke up, with the word “CACT’s” on my mind… Complex ACTions. Packets being dropped by the firewall. My staple diet of support tickets, these days. And something that is often difficult to interpret. I sometimes spend an hour or two to retrieve the logs, format them in Excel and Access, then do SQL queries to filter out the “trash” data to determine the culprits. And even then, I cannot always be sure of my analysis until I verify some facts with the network diagram or ask a colleague to double check my findings.
Thus far, I’ve found some DDOS attacks, some portscans, a virus infection, peer to peer software abuse and some really dodgy DNS systems.
Anyway… this weekend is rAge. First one that I will be attending. Looking forward to see what we here in South Africa call a gaming expo, seeing as we always see coverage of the overseas expo’s but never our own.
Hope you all have a good weekend. See you on the other side.
