Experiences with Symantec SGS 360R

ZoltarStark — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:14:32 +0000

At work I’m using Symantec SGS 360R as a router, firewall and VPN gateway. SGS 360R network appliance belongs to the same 300 series as SGS 320 and SGS 360. The main differences between these three models are:

SGS 320 has four LAN ports, one WAN port and no VPN support
SGS 360 has eight LAN ports, two WAN ports and no VPN support
SGS 360R is like SGS 360 but wih VPN support

Here’s a video (Flash) which shows differences between these three models in more detail.

SGS 360R comes with 10 client licenses for VPN. That means you can have maximum 10 people using VPN at the same time. Unless you use some other VPN method like OpenVPN for example. The VPN client software is only available for Windows and there are two issues I’ve found during usage. First it doesn’t work when Windows firewall is enabled. Third party firewalls work fine, problem is only with the built-in firewall of Windows XP. The second issue is that after installing the VPN client on a laptop the Remote Desktop functionality on the same laptop stopped working. This has occurred on all the machines where the VPN client was installed. I haven’t had the time to exclude the possibility of the culprit being actually some other application since all the PCs had a very similar set of programs installed on them.

SGS can be easily configured using a web browser. It has multiple security features like SPI firewall, IPSec VPN, intrusion detection and prevention, anti-virus policy enforcement and content filtering. It can also be extended with a wireless card to allow WiFi access.

At this point SGS is a bit old as a product, but it looks like it can be still bought.

A few months ago we started having some additional problems with this router. For example, it would drop connection to Internet from time to time (every couple of weeks or so). I’m actually suspecting that the problem was somewhere outside our office since recently we’ve moved and now the problem is gone (ain’t I the Sherlock). We’re even using both WAN ports for load balancing and redundancy. In one of my previous posts I talked about another router Linksys RVS4000. We bought it because of the intermittent connection loss on SGS. For a week or two the Linksys router was working fine but then it died after a firmware update. It wouldn’t connect to the Internet at all. We still had SGS and I was able to put it back in action in a few minutes. Then I connected the second WAN line and everybody noticed speed improvement on downloads.

So what’s the overall verdict? Symantec SGS 360R works fine. Now with double speed.

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That’s how I’ve learned to like Jazz

ZoltarStark — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:18:19 +0000

I needed an external hard disk for backing up my home file server. I decided to get separately a USB enclosure supporting SATA-II disks and install a 500 GB hard disk inside. Why not get the whole package – i.e. a closed box with a USB cable and disk already inside? Let me explain. Separate enclosure means I can remove the disk when transporting it to an off-site location, that saves me over 0.5 kg of weight in my backpack. It might not be much but if you travel already overloaded like I usually do then it does matter. Second reason is that it’s difficult to know what kind of disk is inside one of those closed boxes. With my setup I know exactly what disk it is. As an added bonus I can easily connect it directly inside the file server if I need to (for example if the enclosure died) because both the enclosure and the file server use SATA-II interface.

After doing some research I decided to purchase Enermax EB307S-B Jazz. It just arrived today (thanks alternate.de for a quick delivery). As advertised the enclosure allows a very quick installation. There’s no need to use any tools. Simply unlock the enclosure, slide out the cover and lift it. Now you can install the hard disk – this takes another 15 seconds. Replace the cover, lock it and that’s it. Now just connect power and the USB cable. All this took barely any longer than if the disk was already installed.

Enermax Jazz has a very nice design. Brushed aluminum housing with steel mesh provides very good cooling and sturdiness. It also looks cool since you can see the disk inside. Because the casing is a mesh it doesn’t need a fan which makes it suitable for quiet environments. But be careful with liquids – if you spill anything on the enclosure you will probably fry your data!

After connecting the enclosure to the file server I’ve formatted it. The file server runs Linux so I’ve used ext3 file system but you could use this hardware also with a Mac or Windows machine. Then another couple of minutes to decide what to backup (more or less everything) and I’ve started the copy process. It’s been running for the last 40 minutes and so far 47 GB have been transferred to the external disk. 120 GB more to go… I’m using rsnapshot to perform the backups. It’s a really nice tool I’ve recently discovered. It creates regular snapshots of the directories you tell it to monitor. To save space it uses hard links to store files which haven’t changed since the previous snapshot. Usually that means that your backup space requirements are only about 20-30% more than the amount of data you have, even if you want to have a history of your files going back a few months.

I like Jazz.

Btw, if anybody from UK wants to buy this enclosure I’d suggest to check first if you can get it from a shop on the continent. Price will be much lower.

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Experiences with Symantec SGS 360R

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That’s how I’ve learned to like Jazz

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