FollowI recently bought for a client a Juniper Secure Service Gateway 5 which costs about 800$. For those who do not know what this is, is a more powerful router for your local area network that provides all kind of services, similar with the 30$ router you have at home. The reason for this 800$ router is that it can protect you from the dangers on the internet and many more features that a home router can’t have and off course it spouse to be more reliable.
Well, what my dissatisfaction is right now is that I had to install this SSG5 on a client outside the city. So I bought this equipment, drove to my client and so that this new SSG5 doesn’t work at all. After a few hours of rebooting and testing I gave up and come home with the thought that I will had to go again on my own expense to the client to try to install it again.
After talking to a friend of mine that works with this kind of equipment I found out that before installing it, I would have had to upgrade its fimware. Sad and done, after upgrading the firmware, the SSG5 worked. And this is the first dissatisfaction for me. How it’s possible to pay 800$ and not have the latest firmware installed? And this is just the first part of the problem, because after I went the second time to install the equipment I’ve encountered another problem that does not allow me to set multiple VPN tunnels. The problem consists in the fact that when trying to set a value, you save the setting and if you return to check that setting, you find out that it didn’t save it. I tried numerous methods but nothing, so now I’m a little lost, because I cannot reset the equipment to set it from zero because now my client is using it and I can not stop his activity…. so what now? 800$ for what?! when I coult ask for a VPN connection from my IPS and had no bother….
Well, since it was $800 it means that from the beginning the client base is limited. It could be possible that the model sat a LONG LONG time in stock of a retailer, thus explaining the old FW installed. The same goes with mobile phones, although it’s a bit more complicated to upgrade the FW of a phone than the FW of a router. At that price tag, I would expect AUTO-FW Upgrade (if that even exists), but again, at $800 it should exist. When you buy something that expensive you expect the best and nothing but the best.