Customer Reviews

Safe At Office 500 Internet Security Appliance 5U

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I recently bought a Safe@Office 500 for our small office. The appliance itself is very nice, throughput is decent. The issue pops up when you subscribe to antivirus and support. The division of checkpoint that handles this is Safaware. Their website is currently broken so you can't register (11/4/06). This of course does not stop them from getting you to buy subscriptions through the appliance... unfortunately you can't use them. There is chat help on the sofaware website but you can't use it if you are not signed in which of course you can't do. No support numbers are listed in any of the documentation. It took three calls to Checkpoint to get a number. The tech answered "hello"... no company name. I could barely hear him... he blamed it on a VOIP connection to India.

Most of what we were able to figure out we did on our own, a waste of two business days. We still cannot figure out how to subscribe to or use the antispam features. Getting the right ports open for Quickbooks was not easy. The wireless and wired are on a different range of IP addresses, so you will not see any peer to peer networking without mapping the directories.

Great little appliance, terrible support.

Let me start with what I hate in this unit(yes, it's the right word). When you buy the standard, 5 users version, be ready for nasty surprises - you are going to run out of licenses very soon. Keep in mind that if you also want to use the VPN, every remote user is being counted as 1 more license. I have faced the situation when I had to force my client to spend more money on the add-on licenses after I have recommended this product based on my firewall experience and knowledge of the vendor.

I was thinking my previous experience will be helpful when it comes to configure this firewall. I was wrong because many functions are automated and are hidden, so you really don't know what must be done for certain operations. Due to fact that the documentation is horrible and all the modes and functions are messed up together in each paragraph (instead of separating them by functionality and the purpose), you are on your own to configure it by the method of trials and errors.
I spend quite a long time to play with an interface (even if it is web-based and very simple) because I did not know what is already functioning under the hood and what must be added in order to make the needed functionality.

So, it's better do not have any previous experience because you will be confused if you have some.
Overall, the unit does a job and I trust the security expertise of Check Point - the leading firewall company. If the documentation and the licensing mode would be not a problem, I'd give to this device 5 stars.

This router is good for anything but VPN. I know that sounds a bit harsh, but after wasting significant time and getting no support from Sofaware I find the device is almost useless to access shared resources behind firewall. I am not a beginner and I have done my share VPN setups including other products from Checkpoint. The only thing that works and pretty stable is Remote Desktop over VPN. I tried office mode, setup port rules, etc. I upgraded the firmware, tried the latest Secure Client, I still get the MTU Status as failed (peer too old) error and can't reach any shared resource behind the VPN from Internet. I can only ping. I will try a Cisco.

I have deployed Checkpoint's regular products in the past and the only big downside was the cost. This product delivers the gold standard in firewalls for a trivial amount and Checkpoint's GUI configuration tool is one of the best.

That said, Checkpoint's support has never been anywhere near as strong as Cisco's or IBM's, but I have rarely ever had to call them with their main line products and never with the Sofaware line. Checkpoint seems to have gotten by their on-line subscription problems, and this now works well.

I have used several of these Sofaware boxes for office to office VPNs and it is dead simple to setup. The anti-virus scanning works well, although I have had to turn it off, for outgoing mail only, because of some timeout issues delivering mail to Africa. If you are going to use the spam filtering you need to know that this solution requires you to re-route your mail to Checkpoint's spam scanners, which then forward the mail along to your internal mail server; you will need to fuss with your DNS MX records.

Firmware updates of the firewall software are automatic and transparent. This is a major plus as getting updates to a Cisco PIX and many other firewalls, too, involve a manual firmware update.

I like 'em!