Two of us have been trying to DR our Firewall onto another machine today. The documents available on symantecs website are not clear or complete about the steps you need to do to make a safe DR copy. So far we’ve had to do the following…..
The documents that I’ve referenced are
- Backing up firewall configuration using the built in backup feature which has no corresponding restore document,
- Backup and restore through the SRMC which talks about restoring to a previous installation,
- Backing up and restoring a configuration which sort of works although you end up with a lot of errors
What we actually did is make a note of the old servers name, workgroup,serial number, ip address and gateways.
Copied the files from SG directory and ran a backup from the console.
Installed W2k server (and sp4 but as this is not supported I need to restart the process on SP3)
Named the nics the same as the old server and gave them an ip address
Installed the firewall software
Restored the data from within the rmc. By doing this method all the rules and interfaces worked ok. Previously we tried an install by copying the data files across by hand from SG, stopping the service and running SKSTOOL and starting the service but this ended up with all the rules broken and lots of errors on startup.
By using the restore feature all the rules have come across BUT we did find that the routes have not been migrated across from the old machine to the new one, but everything else has done.
We also need a new licence key for the software on the DR box as the licence key is tied to the serial number of the hard disk.
The performance of the server is excruciatingly slow and keeps crashing so we need to reinstall w2k and try another again on sp2.