Hi all,

I have never used my blogging to complain about anything. I believe blogs should be helpful and should allow you to learn something new that you may never have known before. The blog I am writing now hopefully doesn’t come off as complaining, but maybe more as a way for me to get this information out there for others to review — and maybe we can discuss solutions. Because unfortunately, at the end of this blog, there is no resolution.* But I want to discuss Sonicwall Registration issues.

I am not talking about what to do when you have a Sonicwall, and you need to register it for your account. I am referring to registering for a mysonicwall.com account. I have had the unfortunate experience of having to deal with this, and I want to get some myths and facts squared away.

First off, a little background here: I am a Watchguard guy. I was originally trained on Watchguards, I love the interface, and in my time in Florida it was 90% Watchguard, 10% Sonicwall. We had one client who had a Sonicwall, and I dreaded it. Until I realized they had the Public Server Wizard in the upper right hand corner of the webpage, creating simple rules was as difficult to me as an ASA (I won’t even get into that right now). I have always been a server guy, never strong on networking, so I didn’t understand why Sonicwall needed all of the various components to open a firewall rule. Watchguard made sense to me. You created everything right there with your system manager. I loved it, but upon moving to Colorado, much to my horror, I found that Everon is almost primarily Sonicwalls.

Nevertheless, I took this in stride and began to learn everything I could about these devices. Sonicwall, which was acquired by Dell a few years back, is a good product. It definitely can go toe-to-toe with Watchguard and Cisco ASAs. It is at the forefront of firewall security, so it was something that I needed to learn. I ended up getting a chance to take a Sonicwall home and connect it to my home network. I have a TZ 200, and I wiped it, uploaded the latest firmware at the time, and modified it to match what I wanted out of a firewall.

Flash forward: Everything is working great, but now I want to go further. I want to open some ports and play around a little bit. But first, since it’s been several months, I want to register it as my own. I want a mysonicwall.com account, and I want to update its firmware.

I initially went to mysonicwall.com and began the registration process. Everything seemed right in-line. It looked like I would have my firmware updated by the weekend.

Hold on…. it says my password is poor, with this error:

This password is publicly available in hacking/security forums and can be easily compromised. Please use a different password.

Wow that sounds intense. I really hope the password I chose isn’t available in some forum! I believe it’s a very secure password: I used capital letters, symbols, numbers, and didn’t follow a pattern. It’s over 15 characters! I figure I am going to have to review this later and see if I can find out if I have been compromised in any way. For now, let me input another password….

Same result. (?) How about a different browser…?

Same result. (?!) How about if I VPN into my office at work and try, using a different public IP (because what if, for some weird reason, maybe my IP is blocked)…?

Same result!

Here is a screenshot of the error in all its glory:

I decided to call Sonicwall to discuss. After all, I am sure they want me as a customer, right? I have called Sonicwall probably at least 100 times before with client issues, so I know that, yes, it can take a while to get someone on the phone. But once I do they are great and will help me out.

Once I got a technician on the phone and explained the issue, he said this can only be taken care of through their Customer Service team, by emailing: [email protected]. OK, that was fine, it sounds like I am not getting to work on my Sonicwall at this time, but whatever, as long as we are moving along. I emailed that address, and a ticket was created immediately, and a response came within 24 hours, so progress. The response that was given was simply:

Dear Customer,

 

You should not use special characters while creating an account.

 

Regards,
DELL SonicWALL Customer Support

OK… pretty sure I had tried without special characters, but let’s go at this again and see what happens. Yep, tried without special characters and I still got the error message. So I emailed Sonicwall back to state this and to see if they will set up the account, or what further can I do. Unfortunately here is where the trail goes cold….

…crickets…

It’s been 5 days now, absolutely no responses. I have tried the registration 3-4 times a day, and responded back to the original ticket requesting assistance, and nothing.

Today I thought about the idea, “What if I just click on ‘Register?’ Will it allow me to somehow register an account?”

NO. (This time the error is that my security question/answer has errors in it. The registration page just gives me two blank fields to fill in whatever I want, so I created a question, and filled in an answer! How could there be errors?! I even tried clicking on the question marks to the side of the fields, assuming those are helpful hints, but even those are not clickable.)

At this point I wrote a “less than happy” email back to Customer Support, because I am at the end of my rope. Even when you Google this Sonicwall error message, you don’t really get anything, so that is one reason I decided to write this blog. Am I the crazy one, or are others out there having the same issue?

I found one response on superuser.com, stating that the reason that error exists is because they are reviewing the password in rainbow tables, and if it exists, they are throwing it out. This made me feel a little more secure, like the password I created was not stolen. To further give myself solace, I created an EXTREMELY long and miserable password by typing random letters, numbers, symbols — everything you could think of — into this registration process… and still nothing. (The password was akin to looking something like this: !@We340rj58tr7j&%#$F093jd938de%^&* That looks pretty secure, but apparently not secure enough for Sonicwall.)

Also, just to state, before I get to my conclusion: if/when I get this resolved with Sonicwall, I will let you all know. I know someone, somewhere in that company will resolve this, and I will continue to be a very happy customer of Sonicwall’s. Just right now we are not on the best of terms.

So, In the end, the point of this blog is really to reach out to the world and state a few facts:

• This is a big part of being a remote engineer. We are constantly having to contact 3rd party companies all the time, and when they drop the ball it’s tough to relay that information to the client. Because even though you know you have done everything you can, when your client is wanting you to get info from a 3rd party, and they drop the ball, you can’t help but to feel for your client. It’s like you’ve failed them in some way.
• Sonicwall’s devices are amazing, they are great products, and I recommend them.
• Dell’s customer service for Sonicwall is less than desirable. If anyone has figured out how to create a registration for mysonicwall.com, please email us at [email protected], subject line: Sonicwall.
• And lastly… Watchguards RULE! I still love those devices!

*UPDATE [Two weeks later]: I have resolved this issue, and I have my Sonicwall account created finally! I almost gave up, but I decided that if the original engineer who was assigned to my ticket was not going to get back to me, I was going to email in again separately and create a new ticket. I know how their CRM works — just like at Everon — where when you email in to a specific email address, a ticket gets created and assigned out to an engineer. My thinking is that I received an engineer who didn’t care to help me — unlike at Everon. But this situation does happen at some companies sometimes. So if I email in again and a new ticket gets created, maybe I would get an engineer who cares.

So when I emailed in and a new ticket was created, I did get a response — albeit it took 2 days, and they requested a screenshot of the issue. I sent them a screenshot with my phone number, and they actually called me and set the entire account up! They didn’t sound too happy on the phone, and I am sure they were nervous about talking to me since I sent a very nasty email beforehand. Regardless, the issue is resolved, and I have my account. I hope to never have to use Dell Sonicwall’s customer service center ever again. I will say this as well: my password I ended up using has special characters, so the original technician who suggested I could not use special characters was flat-out wrong.

I hope this helps anyone else who might have been going through the same issues, as this was a nightmare for what honestly should have been a very easy, and quick issue. Good luck!