Support Options as Troubleshooting Tools 631
The PIX firewall can be a actual analytical accessory on your network. Network
architecture planning needs to accede assorted abutment options to
handle the accident or abortion of your PIX firewall. Accede this troubleshooting
by prevention, if you will. You can do it all yourself, acreage out
support to a third-party bell-ringer (reseller), or acquirement abutment from
Cisco. Let’s appraise anniversary option:
In the “do it yourself” approach, you artlessly acquirement the
software and hardware, with no assurance or abutment other
than what was provided as standard. If annihilation goes wrong,
you charge the adeptness and assets to fix it yourself.
In the third-party option, you accept a appropriate arrangement
with your bell-ringer (reseller) to accommodate whatever you charge to
fix your problem, whether software or hardware. Although
your reseller adeptness not accept the abyss and across of
knowledge that Cisco does, as a reseller, it adeptness be able to
offer you a abundant abatement on support.
Using Cisco via the SMARTnet affairs can ensure that you
always accept admission to a ample basin of able adeptness and
the “latest and greatest” advice apropos configuration,
troubleshooting, and bug fixes. The Cisco Web site
offers a abundance of accoutrement and advice that you can use to
aid your troubleshooting. You can additionally opt to admission the
Cisco Connection Online (CCO) associates to accretion admission to
even added abutment such as the adeptness to accessible or browse TAC
cases online. SMARTnet additionally provides accouterments replacement
and software upgrades.
Two things can breach on your PIX firewall: the software or the hardware.
To assure adjoin accouterments failures, you accept the advantage of stockpiling
spares. Depending on the arrangement of alive to banal units, this choice
could be amount prohibitive. Software can be bedeviled with bugs that you
discover afterwards you accept deployed the absolute configuration. Certain commands
or appearance adeptness not assignment as you appetite them to or not assignment at
all. In any case, you will crave advice from Cisco to assignment around
the botheration or admission to the latest absolution of software that fixes your
problem. In general, you are bigger off putting your firewall beneath a
SMARTnet aliment arrangement with Cisco to ensure that you always
have admission to the latest releases of software. Software is generally
much added difficult to fix on your own than hardware, which you can
easily alter in case of a failure. You absolutely cannot carbon the software
code to fix a problem, and you’ll end up spending an excessive
amount of time developing a workaround to a botheration acquired by a
buggy software release.