I bought the product (SSG20) off a recommendation from a reliable source. We usually run Cisco equipment, but we haven’t needed to facilitate this specific need before and the recommendation essentially said, it’s much easier to setup and support with the Juniper Networks Solution, than with the competitive Cisco Solution. Since we were in a hurry and the recommendation was from a reliable source, I took the advice and purchased the Juniper solution rather than the cheaper competitive Cisco Solution.
Once we received the firewall, we began to set it up and all seemed well, however once we began trying to utilize the system further, we began having excessive problems. We were unable to establish a Site to Site VPN connection between the Juniper Firewall and our Cisco Firewall in another location. We worked on the issue for many hours ourselves, then called into Juniper support. The support rep seemed less familiar with the process to establish a Site to Site VPN connection than we were and ended up telling us “everything looks right, it should work, I don’t know why it’s not.” From there he attempted to terminate the call, however we requested to speak with tier 2 support. We were told, “It’s Sunday, and we don’t have any tier 2 support available, so you have to open another ticket on a weekday.” I pushed back insisting that support should include off hours support UNTIL THE PROBLEM IS RESOLVED.” The response was, “Well, there is one tier two guy here, but he’s busy, so you have to open another ticket tomorrow.” Again, I pushed back, insisting to know when he would no longer be busy and why he couldn’t call us back when he finished up with the call he was on. Begrudgingly the Representative agreed, however the call never came. We eventually called back and finally got to talk to tier 2 who told us that the problem was that our setup was not supported by our carrier, and closed the issue.
I was hesitant to believe that the carrier could be the issue, but I contacted the carrier anyway and worked with them to verify that indeed a site to site VPN connection is supported. We then continued to work toward getting the Site to Site connection up and running. Meanwhile, the Cisco device on the other side of the tunnel was successfully managing several connections with other devices without issue, but I remained adamant that the issue was our unfamiliarity with the Juniper device. We opened another ticket with Juniper, still trying to work through the same issue, but again we were told that the configuration of the Juniper was correct and it should be working.
We were eventually able to get the single Site to Site VPN Connection to work, but to do so had to remove all but one subnet as interesting traffic to the tunnel. I was convinced that we could work around this issue, by setting up additional connections to our other offices, rather than routing it all on the single path as planned. We went to setup a second tunnel to a second identical Cisco device. We copied the settings that worked with the first Cisco device, but after many hours of trying everything possible, we never could establish the second connection. (Meanwhile, again, the Cisco device was happily hosting several Site to Site VPN connections without issue. We went so far as to copy the configuration from one Cisco to the other Cisco, and the duplicate the working connection on the Juniper so that we were sure there were NO differences, and alas, it still won’t work.
At this point, I and my team have invested too much time – we’ve combed through the error logs on both sides, researched every error and called support all resulting in frustration with no results. The device clearly is unable to do the job I need it to do and the support has proven to be far less than helpful. I keep hearing how the problem is that we’ve had the device for more than the warranted 30 days, however if support would have ever actually supported us, we’d have known much quicker whether the device is capable of fulfilling the duties we demand of it. Now, as the clock continues to tick, I’ve been waiting for over a week just to find out if we’ll be able to RMA it with apparently very little movement.
I’m exasperated, I have an office full of people who can’t work and I just want to put an end to the madness;
Day 8 of waiting since requesting an RMA - still to no avail. The person we were in contact with sent an email to somebody else asking for what appears to be an escalation within support, but I've not heard from anybody in support either.
Truly horrendous experience. I will not do business with this company ever again.
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