Then, two weeks later, for some reason Cox said he had to change IP addresses again. "They sent me the address range, but when I tried to change the licenses online, I couldn't do it." He called Check Point's support, which kept referring him to one online document after another. "Finally I told them I was paying US$15,000 a year for support, and they were going to stay on the line until this was resolved."

It turned out that he had exceeded his quota for IP address changes, and he had been locked out. And the only people who could help him were in the Israeli office. The problem was, that office was closed on Thursdays and Fridays, and this was a Thursday.

"Finally I asked for the name of the president of the company, and with some crafty investigative work I obtained his phone numbers and called his cell phone. He was in an airport somewhere, and he was pretty surprised to get that call."

The next thing he knew, Check Point vice presidents were calling him. But only the Israel office could give him permanent licenses, and they could not do that until Saturday. The best they could do was issue temporary licenses. "At that point," he said, "I was through with Check Point."

He encountered Stonesoft Corp. at about this time at a computer conference and was impressed with the flexibility and clustering capabilities of its StoneGate firewall. "Everything is GUI-driven, so doing things like changing IP addresses are trivial tasks." He had money in his budget, so he bought two Stonesoft clustered firewalls and passed the Check Point firewalls to another county agency that could use them. That was five years ago, and he says the Stonesoft firewalls are "the easiest I have ever used." He likes them well enough that he just bought an intrusion prevention system from Stonesoft. The IPS works in conjunction with the firewalls to thwart would-be attackers.