Sonicwall Pro 300 Locks Up

[CCHall]

Our Sonicwall Pro 300 freezes every Saturday, and by that I mean that it stops allowing any Internet traffic into or out of our office network. Someone has to manually reboot the firewall to get things moving again. When the device locks up, we can't access the Web interface to view the log, and the log wipes clean by design on reboot. We've found nothing useful in combing the W2K3 server event logs. We have IIS, SQL, and Exchange servers behind the firewall in addition to the file server. We feel like it's not a firewall hardware problem since it happens predictably every Saturday, but darned if we can figure out what's happening.

We don't have a maintenance agreement on the firewall, so we can't get firmware updates or any support whatsoever out of Sonic. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
--CC--

 

[technome]

Do you have the Sonic on a battery backup unit?
Same issue but in NYC... Sunday about 2 am is the time my Sonics use to bug out.
The power supplies in Sonicwall have small power capacitors which can not tolerate even brief voltage sags or split second outages; servers and wks have larger capacitors and will withstand brief power issues, the power utilies actually have specs they adhere to as to spilt second power anomalies they cause. The power utility companies perfer to do power switching or do maintenance on the weekends or after 1 am weekdays (mostly the weekends), which causes power anomalies..place the unit on a BBU

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Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[CCHall]

Thanks for your message, technome. We do have the Sonic on a UPS, and we thought about switching to another UPS. But we kind of figured that if it were the UPS, why would it work for several years up until a couple of months ago. There are other devices on the same UPS that haven't had any issues. However, since you mention it, I will go ahead and give that a try and let you know what happens.
Thanks again,
--CC--

 

[pulsar1]

How about something from the network side. Any chance your isp or local area network is taken down on Saturdays for maintenance or whatever? Try disconnecting the wan cable on the Sonicwall, then put it back after a minute, and see what happens. The Sonciwall should handle this, but as you point out its old, and has not had updates.

Other idea is to put a pc on the wan side of the sonicwall, plugged into the same ups, and have it run lan monitoring software to see what if anything it shows.

Finally, don't know how old your Sonicwall is and when you had the last update, but perhaps there is something out there (virus, worm etc) that it can't cope with, and that is causing the issue.

 

[technome]

Also had the same issue with a unit on a BBU, when the batteries aged; they still kept the server up but I guess the running voltage dropped enough to affect the Sonic
Good luck


........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[CCHall]

I think I found the problem, but only time will tell if this fixes it for good. After combing through the firewall settings dozens of times, I found something telling it to look for updates to the content filter automatically. It was turned on to run early Saturday morning, a couple of hours before we think the firewall has been hanging. Must be turned on by default since I don't think we've ever used the content filter or subscribed to updates.

I changed the time of the updates, and sure enough, the firewall froze about two hours after that time. I'll only breathe a sigh of relief if the thing stays up all weekend now that I've disabled that setting. Thanks to everyone for the help and advice!

--CC--