A first-hand account of SonicWall Support

It has been a long time since we had an emergency incident. Even the entry level SonicWall appliances are robust devices so we hadn’t had to speak directly to the support department for a number of years. But when the lights go out on your firewall leaving just the dreaded "flashing spanner" and there's no access to the interface, you know you have a problem.

Recently, this was the situation faced by a SonicWall customer who called us about their NSa 2650. The firewall is fully licensed and so we knew that the worst case scenario would be that SonicWall Support would send out a new appliance under the hardware warranty.

However…

• The customer is a hotel who could not afford prolonged downtime.
• It was the Friday before a bank holiday weekend and there would be at least a 4-day wait for a replacement. "Next business day" would not be great....
• But most importantly, our onsite engineer was about to go away for the long weekend.

So the clock was ticking.

Our intrepid engineer set off from the office clutching the best device we had in stock – a TZ670 - but in the full knowledge that if the 2650 didn’t respond, the replacement device did not have sufficient ports to be a direct replacement. A lot of manual configuration would be required to get even the basic network services up-and-running.

Finding the NSa 2650 as described, he called the UK SonicWall support line. Whilst waiting on the phone, he unpackaged the TZ670 and with a tear in his eye, watched his long weekend disappearing to the curious on-hold soundtrack of smooth jazz.

Enter the hero of our story. Harish answered the phone. He guided our engineer through several options, including several attempts to factory reset the firewall with the (increasingly rare) technical paperclip. Finally, we got an interface (from the console port), and after some difficulty connecting, our engineer finally got a patient Harish onto the network using a tethered mobile.

He diagnosed an old firmware problem and quickly set about downloading (from mysonicwall) the latest version and uploading to the firewall. And "voila", the lights returned. Downloading the last successful backup from the mysonicwall cloud the previous day, he completed the restoration by uploading the configuration file.

And during all this time, Harish remained on the phone for the 3 hours of troubleshooting to the eventual resolution.

No first line.

No second-line escalation.

No "...we will call you back..."

And at the end of the day, we had a happy client, a happy hotel. And one very happy engineer.

So what's the moral of the story?

Your weekend may depend on it!

And if you are in any doubt contact us ASAP.