The Guard Not Always Watched
So I got to spend some time in sunny Florida last week working with one of my customers and their remote office they just opened down there. It was fun, got lots of work done, had some good food, got to sit on the beach for an hour, and got a ride in a Ferrari! It’s a smaller office, just three desktops and two laptops that come and go. So we went with their standard Watchguard Edge of the X5w variety. This has been their standard remote office unit since they came out, good value and pretty darn rock solid. The box that I recieved though was a little off and I came to discover I got a member of a mis-released batch of the Edge series.
Seems the box was originally going to be labeled the Soho7 until someone in the marketing deparment got ahold of it and decided it needed a new name. Some changes to the firmware, and some other voodoo and out popped the Edge series. Unfortunately it seems there was a batch that slipped out there still containing the original 7.0 firmware and thinking it was a Soho7. It seems that these also have the unfortunate problem of not having their SSL certificate loaded, and not knowing their serial number. The issue with this, you can not load the feature key, and therefore can not activate all the features of your Edge series device.
It seems that Watchguard is trying very hard to keep this particular issue on the DL. After calling and leaving a message and waiting for someone to call me, I finally got the “insert generic middle eastern country here” person to call me back, just to tell me that a Level 2 person would have to fix this issue. After another 30 minutes I finally got a call from a really nice woman at Watchguard by the name of Kimberly. She sat with me on the phone while I installed the new file she had sent me via email that installs the SSL certificate and sets the boxes serial number. The file I was sent was just plain text, which makes me wonder if you can hack your own Watchguard box, but I don’t have a Watchguard of my own to site around and tool with, so we will probably never find out.
In the end, I’ll give Watchguard an A in ability for their tech support, a C- for their responsiveness, and a D- for attempting to hide this issue from the user. Still a nice box, and will continue using it for this customer despite these issues.