The best laid plans...

Fall apart when implemented.Whenever you're in a lab environment there are challenges. It takes a certain mentality to say "Let us gather a bunch of products together, try to make them all work correctly in our environment, then run them through some tests, that sounds like fun, doesn't it?"For the most part, I have that mentality. I like to learn new things and get going through the problems. But about once a year there's a review that just seems horrendous. My WAFS review is one of those. After struggling through multiple layers of network problems, we finally got the network provably correct. The net result of changing the network around a bit was that the WAFS products all had to be re-addressed to different IP subnets. I've discovered that for the most part, they don't handle that well. Sure, if this device was all you were responsible for it wouldn't be a big deal, but to move three devices from three vendors and then troubleshoot the problems that came up was painful at the least.

It's finally coming together. I'm a couple of weeks late, but the network is working correctly, and I'm through re-testing two thirds of the products. Tonight I hope to finish - because it does indeed get easier with each product.

Meanwhile, my security work has been sitting on the bench screaming "Start on me! Start on me!!!" I'm getting there, I've got the Identity Theft article to get moving on, and boy do the vendors have a lot to say about that one. By the end of the week I should be on it, just have a couple of opinion pieces to write first. After the last couple of weeks of living in the labs trying to get through this review, perhaps they shouldn't let me write any opinion stuff ;-).

Until I've dug my way out...

Don.