Sometimes machines fail , in the end all machines fail some day anyway. When it happens to the firewall (Checkpoint ) it might be a very
frustrating event . By failing I mean machine turns on but doesn’t boot or boots into unusable state. The first thought that comes to
the sysadmin looking at such a miserable piece of expensive metal – format/fdisk/Factory Defaults/anything !!!???
If you have Checkpoint Open Server (i.e. Checkpoint VPN-1 software installed on 3rd party server) then most probably you have CD/DVD-drive in it and what left is to find installation CD of the Checkpoint – 30 minutes, some basic rules and your network partially but starts to work.
But if you have a Checkpoint UTM appliance you have a problem. A big one. There is no magic button to restore to factory defaults nor CD/DVD drive to start formatting/reinstalling the firewall immediately. Not that Checkpoint didn’t think about that situation, just reinstalling/reimaging procedure is a bit involved.
I won’t say new things here as all is neatly documented in SecureKnowledgebase of checkpoint.com (sk37231) . But as I get questions about that more frequently than people bother to check at the Checkpoint website here is a short procedure:
- You download from checkpoint.com (with download speeds and image size patience is your friend) UTM image matching your UTM version ;
- You burn it to DVD disk (It is 1,5 Gigabyte in size) ;
- You connect USB DVD drive to USB port in UTM reboot from it and start install from scratch.
That is it.
PS If you happen to forget SSH password of the expert user you are also left with grim option to try to boot appliance from some bootable DVD and reset password, or just plain reinstall the whole firewall. So be very careful about SSH passwords for the UTM appliances.