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Evaluation Concerns! Forum members great, Sophos engineers... not so much.

Greetings all. 15 days into evaluating SG125 before making larger purchase.

I've invested a week of all-nighters lurking in here, getting up to speed on this device, programming it to suit my environment, and testing.

I really want to like this gear and I don't want to burn future bridges, but every time I come here looking for "workarounds", I unravel much larger concerns.

I see a lot of highly skilled and really nice users in here trying to polish a turd. Can someone please correct me on why I shouldn't be alarmed by the following debacle below.

Did this ever get resolved? Should users really be having to do the work of flippant and utterly incompetent "engineers"?

Again, I don't want to come off smug with anyone in here, you guys seem to be the only glue holding this thing together. As a wavering potential Sophos customer I'm thinking some of you should be hired to replace the "engineers".

Leakage...

First post 10/13/2013 Despite Masquerading Internal Addresses Appear On WAN-Interface Last post 05-21-2014

First post 10/14/2013 Internal IP in IP Packet from Internet???? Last post 10/14/2013

On 12/23/2013 TheDrew finds Workaround Rule

First post 2/23/2014 Strange Masquerading Issue Last post 3/21/2014

On 2/28/2014 Goldy finds another workaround of turning on Use strict TCP session handling. Unfortunately BarryG points out this breaks login to Network Solutions (which undoubtedly means there are other breaks as well).

This thread was automatically locked due to age.

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0 teched_01 over 10 years ago
Market silk purses and ship sow's ears?

Remember this is almost entirely a user-to-user bulletin with little to no official Sophos involvement.  It is not necessarily a complete view of the support and engineering situation.

Ölm post about Pre-Sales Support:  https://www.astaro.org/gateway-products/web-protection-web-filtering-application-visibility-control/51620-9-200-web-filtering-causing-slow-internet-browsing-9.html#post268924

Work with your partner on the possibilities of taking support on a few test drives to gauge the standard/premium processes and procedures.

Take full advantage any pre-purchase, or pre-large-purchase, support possibilities:

Document every glitch, miss-documentation and malfunction.
Build out as big a test environment as you can and break the product, or prove it isn't broken, before you've bought it.
Push everything you can through the pre-sales engineers, support, sales and partner(s).
Published (and tested) public patches/updates should be preferable to promises and hotfixes.

Make sure what you think you are buying and what they think they are selling are the same:

Document your assumptions and expectations and get clear confirmation that you aren't buying misunderstandings.  (Performance, capabilities, functionality, compatibility.)
Get, in writing, confirmation that your intended design and implementation is a supported and recommended configuration.  Just because it is documented doesn't mean it works well (or at all).

It has been more than a year since I've interacted with Sophos Support (add salt, as needed):

Previously (2013) I'd written
[URL="https://www.astaro.org/gateway-products/general-discussion/47442-support-feedback-please.html#post233566"]I think "Platinum" is very inexpensive for 24x7 access to support - but don't think that that will mean support is working on your problem 24x7.

I've spent days waiting to hear anything back after an escalation - calling daily sometimes for a status update which often was "it has been escalated" then spotty responses after work appeared to begin. (These woes relate to the webproxy.)

I won't pretend I'm the ideal customer or that support is ideal.[/URL]

And earlier this year I wrote:
"Premium support is inexpensive, I feel, but if I were involved in another serious UTM deployment I'd certainly be looking for a partner to help fill in gaps (such as hold spares or provide a short term software license on demand in the event of a hardware appliance failure) and keep us and any problems on Sophos sales/support/engineering's radar."

Call it cynicism, or experience, I don't think of it as evaluating/buying "support", "solutions" or even "products" instead, hopefully, "semi-specific set(s) of problems" and "help sorting out the(ir) mess".
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0 teched_01 over 10 years ago
Market silk purses and ship sow's ears?

Remember this is almost entirely a user-to-user bulletin with little to no official Sophos involvement.  It is not necessarily a complete view of the support and engineering situation.

Ölm post about Pre-Sales Support:  https://www.astaro.org/gateway-products/web-protection-web-filtering-application-visibility-control/51620-9-200-web-filtering-causing-slow-internet-browsing-9.html#post268924

Work with your partner on the possibilities of taking support on a few test drives to gauge the standard/premium processes and procedures.

Take full advantage any pre-purchase, or pre-large-purchase, support possibilities:

Document every glitch, miss-documentation and malfunction.
Build out as big a test environment as you can and break the product, or prove it isn't broken, before you've bought it.
Push everything you can through the pre-sales engineers, support, sales and partner(s).
Published (and tested) public patches/updates should be preferable to promises and hotfixes.

Make sure what you think you are buying and what they think they are selling are the same:

Document your assumptions and expectations and get clear confirmation that you aren't buying misunderstandings.  (Performance, capabilities, functionality, compatibility.)
Get, in writing, confirmation that your intended design and implementation is a supported and recommended configuration.  Just because it is documented doesn't mean it works well (or at all).

It has been more than a year since I've interacted with Sophos Support (add salt, as needed):

Previously (2013) I'd written
[URL="https://www.astaro.org/gateway-products/general-discussion/47442-support-feedback-please.html#post233566"]I think "Platinum" is very inexpensive for 24x7 access to support - but don't think that that will mean support is working on your problem 24x7.

I've spent days waiting to hear anything back after an escalation - calling daily sometimes for a status update which often was "it has been escalated" then spotty responses after work appeared to begin. (These woes relate to the webproxy.)

I won't pretend I'm the ideal customer or that support is ideal.[/URL]

And earlier this year I wrote:
"Premium support is inexpensive, I feel, but if I were involved in another serious UTM deployment I'd certainly be looking for a partner to help fill in gaps (such as hold spares or provide a short term software license on demand in the event of a hardware appliance failure) and keep us and any problems on Sophos sales/support/engineering's radar."

Call it cynicism, or experience, I don't think of it as evaluating/buying "support", "solutions" or even "products" instead, hopefully, "semi-specific set(s) of problems" and "help sorting out the(ir) mess".
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0 GetParanoid over 10 years ago in reply to teched_01

teched,

Thanks for the link, might as well make some noise before deciding if I want to keep this pandora's box. I've never understood why companies buy up cool stuff like this and then take a dump all over it. Just finding out now I'm one of the "lucky" 1% who got pushed 9.301-2 early and learning about neat features like corrupted RPM Database and whatnot.

I've already gone into this with an absolute requirement of having a pair, I'm just trying to figure out now if this will be a pair of Aces or deuces.
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0 BrucekConvergent over 10 years ago in reply to GetParanoid

GetParanoid, I suggest you take up your concerns with your reseller, nothing I, or anyone else can say on this board would probably change your mind; As another poster said, realize this is a user-to-user board, and to get access to Sophos Support (since you are in an evaluation phase), I would contact your reseller.

Welcome to the forum.
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