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cosmos
Advisor

SmartConsole Responsiveness / stability

I've posted about this before, want to know if I am alone or Check Point have acknowledged these issues and addressed the root cause(s).

Unfortunately many environments I'm tasked with either maintaining or upgrading are still on R80.40, some still on 77.30 with extended maintenance. I realise these are old versions but have seen similar behaviour in R81.10 so it appears these issues follow the product upgrades...

  1. Console unresponsive
    1. During normal operations (e.g. opening a gateway, opening a new policy, switching tabs) the console takes its sweet time and often becomes unresponsive, with either a spinning wheel or entire window washout
    2. If an admin clicks on the console while this happens, one of two things will happen
      1. Windows will report the application is unresponsive and ask to wait or kill (waiting usually works)
      2. The console exits immediately with no error
    3. When in full screen, the app window will expand and take the entire screen (including taskbar) rendering the machine running the app unusable while the console is thinking...
    4. This is probably my biggest gripe and I echo my customer's concerns
      1. I've heard some quietly say "please don't crash" while they perform a normal function even in an R81 console
      2. This aligns with my theory you must get out of bed on the right side, or the planets must be aligned before you even think about doing ugprades
      3. I get this consistently in 81.10.9600.410 on opening a specific gateway's topology
  2. Console steals focus from other applications
    1. There is no need to explain, it just shouldn't happen
  3. Inconsistent policy / object searches
    1. Searches in policy for matching say src & dst IP are wildly inconsistent - at times the search won't display rules where the IPs are used in objects in groups in those rules
    2. Partial searches for objects containing a string in the sidebar and Object Explorer don't yield objects names that contain the search string
  4. Impossible to sort Gateways by clusters & members in the Policy Installation window once the sort order is changed
    1. This seems to have been fixed in recent builds both R80 and 81
  5. Policy installation process takes a while to appear in task list, at times when it is nearly complete
    1. As if what the console is drawing is read from a table in a database that hasn't updated yet...
  6. No consistency with window behaviour
    1. Some windows allow you to click on the console window behind it, which can lead to all sorts of issues if you make changes, other windows prevent you from doing so
    2. Case in point: when clicking outside a VSX operation window, the publish did not complete and left the VS on the VSX gateway but no object in the CMA

These functionality issues are not new, and make using the console a frustrating experience. To get these issues addressed by TAC is painful especially when they are blocking or delaying normal operations - it's not the responsibility of the customer. While some of these issues may be a result of very old databases that have been subject to multiple upgrades over decades, others (focus stealing, crashing) have persisted throughout several generations of console.

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