License Pulled From Server, Configs Reset

[Kaimberent]

Before I go off on an angry rant, let me say that Untangle has been one of the best firewall solutions I have used. And in this case, the software was not to blame. Poor communication and support was. So let me begin:

I took over the IT department of a small business and inherited our Untangle gateway from my predecessor. He had purchased several of the upgrades for Untangle. Specifically, he had purchased Policy Manager (among others, but thats the relevant one to the story.) Having inherited the server I was not aware the Policy Manager was an annual recurring fee. Upon receiving a bill I contacted the email on the bill and told them I did not want Policy Manager and explained the situation. Up to this point, everything was good. I made an oversight with my licensing, and I was taking steps to correct it. Well, after the email I never heard back from anyone about removing the license or other steps I would need to take.

This morning I get a call at about 7am (When our security guys got in) saying the internet was down. I checked everything and noticed that basically all web traffic was being blocked by Untangle. My first thought was that I'd screwed something up the day before, human error and such. To my surprise, the license for Policy Manager had been removed from Untangle with no notice to me and reset some key firewall rules. Fortunately I was able to rework them from memory quickly.

I understand that the licensing issue was my fault. I take responsibility for that oversight and was attempting to correct it. What I am extremely upset about is that I was not informed of a key change to a core network device, causing an outage for my business. There was no followup email, no phone call, nothing. To say this was poor support is an understatement.

I plan to continue using Untangle because it is such a rock solid solution and in the hopes that this is an isolated incident. Just thought I would share this incident in the hopes that someone from Untangle will read it and inform the relevant person.

Thanks,
-Clayton Smith
IT Coordinator, Rivercenter Inc

[sky-knight]

Untangle's license enforcement is brutally simple. If a module expires, it powers down.

In the case of the policy manager, all policies revert to pushing traffic into the default rack. If your default rack's firewall module isn't ready for this, you end up with issues. Similar disastrous results can happen if the WAN Balancer or WAN Failover modules expire.

If you renew the policy manager, the previous rule structure and racks will be accessible to you.

[Kaimberent]

Well, that would have been simple enough except that the license was removed. It didn't expire. It had already been renewed but since the CC was no longer valid they had to send us a bill. Our accountant was even wondering if we should pay a pro-rate since we used the module for a period of time. I was expecting at least a reply email telling me the license would be void on X date, a pro-rate bill or some other form of communication before my critical piece of gear stopped working.

[dmorris]

Sorry for your bad experience.
Unfortunately, we've had to make it such that if customers stop paying that the paid products stop working. If the paid products continue working we owe money to our OEM providers *and* customers don't tend to start paying again.

No configuration changes are made. Your config is still there.
In fact, all your apps and config continue working as normal - only those apps without valid licenses don't work.

If you had an outage its because you've configured your policies in such a way that the default policy causes boxes to be offline. In this case when you lose Policy Manager and your other policies - everyone gets the default policy. Once you provide a valid license for Policy Manager, it will operate normally again. (Or you can just reconfigure your network such that one policy covers everyone)