Thus we decided to move from PC (even server, but still PC architecture) to professional network routing/firewall equipment with all necessary functions like firewall, tunneling, advanced routing, VLAN support and so on, easy maintainable, high reliability. After deep analysis of competitive equipment we have choosen Juniper NetScreen 208 - firewall/VPN appliance with required performance and function set. These devices are little bit outdated but still very powerfull and high performance and suit for our purposes well.

You can review the characteristics of these devices in the technical sheet: juniper-netscreen-204-208. There is more than enough for our purposes. We have acquired 3 units of NS 208 to build network with 2 firewall perimeter and 1 DMZ between. 1 unit we have decided to hold reserved.

But after connecting the devices we have found a problem. One of them had the last firmware available (5.4.0) and other has very outdated firmware (4.0.3) and we was unable to use the second because it has a lot of known bugs. So we have decided to upgrade to 5.4.0 firmware from first device. First of all we have extracted the firmware from the first device and tried to upload it to second one. But we failed. The device said “Firmware image is too large!”. We have checked the hardware version on both devices and found the same one. To answer our question “Why?” we have found several articles which said “Use intermediate versions of firmware to upgrade.”. When we have tried to find some intermediate versions we have failed again because there is no available in the internet and Juniper avoids to publish them to protect customers. We have contacted our local Juniper partner and they offered to buy several thousand dollar contract for support (even if we don’t need it) and they will provide us with firmware. We even tried to hire electronic engineers to copy whole flash memory from one device to another. But…

We have found the device is able to boot from network via tftp. We tried to boot from network 5.4.0 firmware and it did it successfuly, after booting the kernel became to upgrade filesystem and run well. Under the last kernel we have installed it from tftp to flash and it installed well again. So we begun to build perimeter and saved a lot of money.

The good news for our customers from USA and Europe! We have employed nigh-shift customer support manager who will work in US timezone to help our customers feel free. We believe this step will help us to support you even better.

New sphere of our activity is ISP business. We collaborate with one of major providers located in Tomsk to provide next level internet traffic and voice services to our local citizens. We believe our service will help Tomsk users to get internet services in convinient and cost-effective way.

We still continue to publish our design works and you will find next release soon. Our team is also working on new website design so there will be some works to switch to new structure and design.

Bitworks Team.

Author Olga Nikulchikova

Instruments: Adobe Photoshop, 3DS Max

Author Dmitry Poyarkov