Your chance to get creative

[Trihimbulus]

Ok guys - here is your chance to get creative. I am gonna lay it out for ya first:

At my office, we have a hardware firewall that keeps needing to be reset. After much beef with the support people, we have just decided to try to get around this problem ourselves. Everytime the firewall kicks off, I have to drive 30 minutes back to work and manually reset the thing (i.e. unplug it and then plug it back in). The reason I have to come in is because we are using OWA and we have to be able to hit or email from home.

Now, we are thinking of ways that we can reset the damn thing from home.
1) My supervisor thinks we need to route it through a computer with a dial-up modem ( basically a DTMF system ) and somehow configure it so we can just reset the hardware firewall with a press of a button over the phone. - So how would I go about setting this up and doing it?
2) Would it be possible to setup an UPS under the firewall that is connected to a Server via USB, somehow connect to the server via a home computer, and reset it like that? Yet again, how would I do this
3) And finally, what would you guys do here? Please help and any feedback would be kickin'!!

 

[mikesgroovin]

I would personally try and figure out what the problem with the firewall is. are you recording trends when it goes down? throw a packet sniffer on the network in between the firewall and the next internal device. can you draw out your schematic here? what brand/model firewall are you using?

 

[Trihimbulus]

Its a 3com OfficeConnect DMZ-

 

[office politics]

i'd say look for a firmware upgrade or a 3com KB. What are the symtoms on the client pcs?

 

[Trihimbulus]

Well inside the LAN, the clients are talking to the network just fine (except once every 3 weeks the Firewall has to be reset). On the WAN when we try to connect to OWA, we get a HTTPS 1.5 error saying it cannot be found. That when I have to put my beer down, and drive to work on a Saturday night to reset the firewall so employees can hit OWA. Isn't life great...