sonicewall config ? Quck question ?

jbla

having used SonicWalls i do know that the Node limit is for active connections thorugh the firewall on a per computer basis.  You can purchase additional liceses however.

As for a VPN limit there is one of those as well, but it varies based on model and version.

thanks for the clarification Neranel. From experience I do not recommend sonicwalls. I have 3 of them and I am replacing them with Cisco ASA 5505s  which can handle more users and more more advanced configurations. I used to run a sonic wall Pro at my main site, I replaced it with a CIsco 5510 and my VPN users noticed a huge performance boost. if you are familiar with Cisco Devices I would look at the Cisco ASAs

I also steer my clients away from sonic walls to the two product series i spoke of earlier.  Unless your 500+ nodes you dont need to buy cisco though. Though if your a nonprofit go buy cisco at techsoup.org, the prices for nonporfits that ate 501c3 are insane.

I think the issue is not the licensing but they seem to think you have more control from a servers point if you push it through the server.

As for the other questions we do user DHCP and is that 25 node deal per Natted Connection ? I mean we have 80+ computers with DHCP and they use NAT and only go out the 1 internet Ip to the router would that sitll work or do we need more licenses ?

no, each computer that will connect to the internet through the device will eat one node while it has an active connection.

one computer having connections on multiple ports will not increase its usage, it will still only use 1 node.

It is pretty apparent what the connecting thorugh your server was trying to accomplish as if you wanted to do that for sake of control, the sonic wall has web filtering and email scanning functionality bbuilt right in, (those are the capabilities that a proxy server(the method sugested) would get you.) if thats the desire, use the sonic wall, as the routing through the server will not benefit you those features unless you also buy a software such as ISA server. (which will slow down your server horrendously as mentioned before.

the nodes have nothing to do with DHCP, though the sonicwall as well as every other device mentioned in the thread has the ability to also be a DHCP server.

well you'd have more control if you were using something like ISA server or another content mangement server software. it sounds like you're not using that though. That's basically the only thing that would necessarily give you more control. routers/firewalls should do anything you would need I imagine.

I thank you all for you help I am going to call and maybe get more info. As we do not have an ISA server here or anything like that at this point.