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I've had no issues with R81.20 for management installations (Management, HA management, Smart Event and Log). Have been facing some issues where Log View in Smart Console is complaining about logs either being moved or corrupted. But I managed to fix this by running evstop, removing all indexing data, evstart to re-build all indexes and thus far the issue has not re-appeared. This has happened to me on two different R81.20 environments. But that is pretty much it. They are all running R81.20 + JHF Take 8.

On gateways on the other hand I've been facing far more issues. I wouldn't really recommended R81.20 for gateways unless you really want some of the new features. But customers love Network Feeds, and for good reason. It makes life so much easier when you can just toss well-known blacklists, vendor recommended whitelists and whatnot directly into your access policy. It also allows for network admins not familiar with Check Point to administer a server with lists for both whitelisting and blacklisting, just modify whatever txt or json you have on the server and the policy on the firewall will adopt it. IOC Feeds have allowed similar capabilities, but the procedure and compatibility is vastly superior with R81.20 and Network Feeds.

The one thing that strikes me as really odd with R81.20 is the lack of JHF's available. GA since November, and all we have thus far is a "latest", aka on-going JHF and that's it. I normally work with customers that are "early adopters", not EA customers, they don't work with yet-to-release BETA versions, but they are quite agile and often move to new versions before they become "widely recommended". R81.20 has to be the release with the slowest rollout of JHF's out of all R8X.XX releases? 5 months and just a single JHF which is not even recommended?

One could argue this might be because R81.20 is having very few issues. But then it comes off as quite odd for it not getting "recommended" status by now. And considering the amount of JHF's we've gotten for R80.40, R81 and R81.10 in the past 5 months, and how much of the code and daemons that are shared between versions I have a hard time believing that R81.20 isn't going to get a lot of the same changes. Once the next R81.20 JHF drops I'd bet the change-log is going to show a lot of similar changes as the past few JHFs for R81.10.