The other steveb - Steve Banks' Blog on SBS, EBS, and other Small Business Technology Topics : Calyptix

Calyptix and Third Tier team up for a great support combo!

steveb — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:44:00 GMT

Congratulations to both Calyptix and Third Tier for a great idea in bringing in Third Tier as Calyptix's AccessEnforcer™ integration support team. From my personal experience with both companies and their respective key individuals, I see this as a win-win combination for everyone involved. Calyptix, Third Tier, Calyptix's partners and most importantly, Calyptix's end user customers. Check out the BusinessWire press release!

Very cool news indeed!

Steve

Calyptix, IP blocks, and SMTP servers

steveb — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:07:00 GMT

Calyptix Access Enforcer firewalls are great. I'm writing this post from behind our AE1000 right now. I'm a big fan of theirs and intend to deploy many more at our customer sites as we refresh their existing firewalls and servers. That said, there is a bit of an issue with the SMTP aliasing right now. If you are using a single IP, or have it behind another NAT device (normally a DSL or cable broadband endpoint) then you are okay. But if you have a block of IPs configured in the Calyptix be careful. If you have x.x.x.21 as the Calyptix WAN address and your SMTP server is at x.x.x.22 then your outbound mail is going to have reverse DNS issues because all mail passes through the Calyptix and reflects the Calyptix external IP, not the SMTP server's public IP that you've mapped. It is a very simple fix to flip the external IP of the Calyptix over to the x.x.x.22 and you'll already have the ports mapped properly (those don't change) if you were doing mapping, at least that was the case with the one I took care of earlier today. Nothing else had to change on the LAN or any other settings on the Calyptix, at least for our situation. Calyptix recommends that partners check out https://partners.calyptix.com/node/131 for gotchas to watch out for when doing this too.

Calyptix is aware of the issue (they recommended the IP swap to us) and have a fix in the works that will erase the need for the steps above, but if you have recently deployed an AE with multiple IPs assigned to it and are running into hassles, check your mail headers and try the IP swap.

Have a Calyptix and Microsoft Updates are failing?

steveb — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:09:00 GMT

Setting up a new Windows 2008 x64 Server and loading updates on a customer's Vista notebook. Having updates fail on the server with an 802002b error stating "Windows Update encountered an unknown error" on the 2008 box. I have also been having an IE 7 update failing consistently on our SBS 2003 box. Decided to try turning off the Web monitoring/filtering our office's Calyptix AE1000. All updates completed without any trouble. I like the Calyptix, but if you are running into similar errors, either on Calyptix, or other firewalls for that matter, try turning off the monitoring / outbound filtering.