The Boston Celtics established their VPN
connection to National Basketball Association headquarters in New York early in
1999. Many of the teams protecting their Local Area Networks (LANs) with
firewalls were having problems making the VPN connections and keeping them open.
And firewall products such as Axent Technologies’ Raptor Firewall were still in
the $10,000-$20,000 range.
Director of Technology, Jay Wessel, who has
worked with the Celtics for 10 years, sought an easy-to-install and manage
security solution to protect the internal Local Area Network (LAN), keep
employees from using unauthorized Internet chat programs and still allow the
interleague VPN to work smoothly (via PPTP). Even simple packet filtering made
Wessel leery. “I’ve been at this since before networking, but I felt stupid
trying to get packet filtering to work effectively,” Wessel noted. The firewall
they were using, packet filtering on their Netopia router, was slowing the
network down. So, in 1999, Wessel sought a “real firewall.”
SonicWALL appealed to the Celtics because of
its ease of use and price. They planned to spend $10,000 for two firewalls for
their DSL connections. Even after purchasing and installing two SonicWALL PROs
(at headquarters and their practice facility), the Celtics have spent only a
little more than one-half that amount. And installation, Wessel noted, “couldn’t
have been simpler. The whole project, with testing, took half a day from start
to finish.”
To test the SonicWALL, Wessel tried getting to
PC Anywhere from other LANs, ran basic ping, telnet and ftp tests, and confirmed
that the Network Access Rules he had configured were working correctly. He
studied the log and found people using Internet chat programs who shouldn’t have
been. So, he blocked them using Network Access Rules.
“I don’t know what all the packets were doing
before we set up the SonicWALL,” Wessel said. “But they’re not doing it
anymore.” Their PPTP VPN connection, “the most important part of the network to
keep working,” has worked cleanly with SonicWALL in place. The SonicWALL’s
success, Wessel explained, has been “unexciting. But it’s good for a security
appliance to be unexciting.”
To learn more about the
SonicWALL firewall and its components and features,
please visit our web site dedicated to SonicWall by clicking on the button
below.
