SonicWALL Pro 4100

A firewall appliance is a physical device using an embedded operating system and dedicated to one role, namely securing access to a network. Over the last few years such devices have evolved from simply being a firewall to being a multi-faceted security device offering a range of solutions from packet inspection to anti-virus, anti-spam, content blocking monsters.

What makes these appliances ideal is that the OS is not accessible, they are easily configured and they replace a lot of mismatched software solutions that can often cause compatibility problems. Such problems create instability and do nothing to reduce your attack footprint. Another sign of the maturing of this market is that vendors no longer see themselves as a single point of protection but now talk about the need for layered security.

The SonicWALL Pro 4100 is an enterprise class firewall appliance with lots of built-in features. These features allow you to secure your enterprise against virtually any kind of electronic threat and all in a single box. It is designed to sit at the key gateway to your network and sports 10 gigabit Ethernet ports.

When you open the box, the SonicWALL Pro 4100 looks a little understated - encased in a 1U grey box with 10 ports on the front, a power port on the back and a serial port. You get power, network and serial cables, a CD with documentation and utilities, a getting started guide and mounting brackets to house the device in a standard rack cabinet.

Getting started is simple. Apply power, connect to the WAN, and connect to a laptop or PC using an Ethernet cable or via the serial cable console port and turn on. The 4100 takes around 90 seconds to boot and will assign a DHCP address to the laptop if connected via a network cable. If you are using the serial cable you will need to configure your terminal emulation application which should take mere seconds.

For some strange reason, SonicWALL has decided that of the ports on the front, X0 will relate to your LAN, X1 to the WAN and X2-9 are user definable. It would have been more intuitive to make X0 the WAN.

Once you are connected to the 4100, the first thing to do is set its address on your network, save and restart. Once you are logged back in, you only need to run the wizard to configure the 4100. One of the nice things about the 4100 is that it is so easy to get a basic secure setup. From box to completing the wizard and rebooting to ensure settings are properly applied took just under six minutes.

Now that you have a basic level of security in place, the fun begins. SonicWALL, like all security vendors, is very focused on Unified Threat Management (UTM). What this means to the rest of us is that if something can cause a threat, the appliance needs to be able to deal with it. This is where the 4100 is very powerful and very confusing.

The first thing to do is register your 4100. SonicWALL only allows access to firmware updates to registered customers. Registration also gives you the option of downloading and unlocking some of the extra features for 30 days to see what they do. This includes features such as Intrusion Prevention Service, GateWay Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Network Anti-Virus and Premium Content Filtering Service.

SonicWALL has kept its old menu structure and this was very helpful in beginning to navigate such a complex product. I was able to quickly get to the settings that I knew I wanted access to such as VPN, DHCP and log files and ensure that they were configured as needed.