When your firewall dies, and you need something, FAST.

For a number of years, I've been mentioning to colleagues, managers, interested members of staff and random strangers in the supermarket (well maybe not the last one) that I don't like single points of failure in enterprise ICT infrastructure.

I occasionally picture my network layout in my head, and think about the single points of failure with dread.

"One of these days, that single fancy firewall is going to die. And we're not going to be happy about it". 

Said firewall "died" last week...

Caching servers are a great idea with new IOS releases...

Would you like to save hundreds of gigabytes of Internet traffic?

That's some serious caching...

With the recent release of IOS 10, it's clear our users have been chomping through a fair few megabytes of data... Hopefully, we don't see too many people visiting us with "early adopter flu" in the next few days...

http://www.techradar.com/how-to/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/ios-10-problems-here-s-how-to-fix-the-most-common-issues-1328553

Netflix, have you heard about RFC 952?

Having had a firewall melt-down last week (the subject of another post, when I get around to it), I rebuilt our entire firewall ruleset from scratch, because the config backups simply brought back the undesired effects (clearly something in the 45,000 lines of config disagreed with it...).

As a result, I've ended up "experimenting" with some options, with sometimes unintended, or non-obvious effects.

Netflix. It's broken. Oh noes!

One early casualty was Netflix - one of the few video streaming things we allow (because: bandwidth [available on plentiful and cheap national traffic] and legality [has a legitimate presence in South Africa]). Children love copyright infringing content; I try to make it easy to access legal stuff instead.