Christmas Comes early at FUMC

First Church has a new gateway security device this holiday season. Mark Moreno hooked us up with a great deal on a Sonicwall NSA 2400. Configuration was pretty straight-forward using a web interface compatible with Firefox which makes me happy. I would say it is moderately easier than our old Firebox x700. Some of the key highlights we are taking advantage of are:

• Multiple Interfaces – configured as a completely separate network for our guests. Maybe in the future we can use this for a failover WAN connection
• Gateway Antivirus and content filtering. A must have at a church
• Packet level inspection, realtime so it doesn’t slow us down
• Tons of VPN connections
• [UPDATE] – We are successfully using interface 2 for our guest wireless network which allows unencrypted access for our visitors!
• [UDPATE] – We have interface 3 configured as a second WAN connection. In actuality this is just a wireless bridge to the Bread of Life. BOL has their own Cox high speed internet. I have that pfSense Firebox configured with multiple interfaces, one of them being a LAN to the FUMC WAN. It is working REALLY well. However, the likelihood that one of us will be up and not the other is minimal 🙁 We do a round-robin load balance.
• [UPDATE] – The SSLVPN connection through the Sonicwall is AWESOME!! It allows access at the IP level with NETBIOS. The makes it easy to log in from home and check on printers, switches, etc… Very nice feature

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