Firewall Migration (from Symantec to Fortinet)

Was engaged in doing a Firewall implementation project for a shipping customer. The project involved these preparation:

Pre-migration Preparation (Wed-Thu, 16-17 Dec)
1) Export & Review (current) Symantec Firewall Policies/NAT rules/objects
2) Create Firewall Policies on Fortinet Firewall

Migration Day (Sat-Sun, 2o-21 Dec)
1) Rack up 2 sets Fortinet Firewalls
2) Cables preparation (with Network Engineering team)
3) Initiate Cutover to new Fortinet Firewalls (Active/Passive mode)
4) Configure Fortinet Firewalls to Active/Active mode
5) Perform Firewall policies tests
6) Perform High Availability test (BGP routing test, L2 redundancy test and Firewall HA test)
7) Perform Fortinet Web Filtering test*

Post Migration Follow-Up (21 Dec Monday)
1) On next Business day, follow up with customer on Firewall performance and issues (if any)
2) Only 2 issues reported and 1 resolved on same day. 1 outstanding and customer reviewing their architecture for that issue.

Overall Project Review
================
- Pretty smooth migration on migration day with about 95% objectives achieved
- Issue with network design for 1 x Sonicwall IPSEC firewall (still oustanding)


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Project Statistics:
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Man-days consumed: 4 Man-days
No. of Fortinet Firewalls implemented: 2 sets
No. of rules migrated: 100+
Customer Satisfaction: Fairly Good

ROBOCOPY (Windows utility for volume file copy)

I was doing a file server files migration to a SAN backend Windows File (Cluster) Server.

The total fileszie to transfer was about 450GB and using Windows Explorer style file copy/paste didnt work for huge folders. Then I found ROBOCOPY.exe as part of a Windows resource utility.

It can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en

VMFS

Was doing some researching into virtualisation and found the concept of VMFS

The whitepaper is available here:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmfs-best-practices-wp.pdf

Server Recovery Procedure [IBM/Acronis/Win2003/bad stripe]

Occurrence Summary:
================

Server: IBM System X 3400
Problem: Bad Stripe in RAID array
Suspected cause: Improper shutdown of system
Backup SW: Acronis True Image
Backup media: External USB HDD 1 TB

1) Server diagnosed with bad stripe [there is no way to repair bad strip in RAID 5, other than deleting and creating a NEW array]

2) Acronis backup software deployed to backup all available good data [but backup encounter problem relating to bad sectors]

3) In Win2k3, ran "CHKDSK -r" (repair) to mark and update bad sector table so that Acronis backup will not complain about "failure to read"

4) Re-run Acronis FULL backup, success success success.

5) Proceed to run ServeRAID to delete existing RAID logical drive and create a new RAID logical drive (raid 5). This seems the only way to remove bad stripe table entries.

6) ServerGuide 7.4.17 to rebuilt NOS (Win 2003). Saved me the trouble to find 3rd party RAID drivers in floppy form.

7) Win 2003 R2 Std installation completed in style

8) Install Acronis True Image with Universal Restore

9) Insert backup media (external USB 1TB HDD for my case)

10) Run "Restore" in Acronis, select backup file (.tib) and start Restore process

11) After 5 hours, 500+ GB data was restored.

*ServeGuide/ServerRAID/Acronis/Windows/IBM are trademarks of respective vendors.