[SOLVED] "therapeutic restart" of gateway device

earwaxntoast · 02-21-2012, 05:24 PM

My boss today asked me to begin doing a "therapeutic restart" today of our gateway device based on some vague reports of issues from outsourced developers attempting to connect to it via the SSL VPN half a world away.

I told him that would bring the entire network down, and could potentially cause problems with the static vpn tunnel that we have with our colo, but he insisted that it could help.

Can anyone offer any reasons why this is a Bad Thing, or reasons why I'm wrong and it's not so bad after all?

macemoneta · 02-21-2012, 11:39 PM

I'd suggest that you're wrong, because you've described a fragile network element. If, in fact the situation is as you describe, it needs to be corrected. Equipment fails, always at the worst time. You can think of these scheduled outages as a test of the resiliency of the configuration. If there are gaps identified by the restart, address them.