The Cyberoam range of Unified Threat Management appliances provide a cost effective solution to the range of threat faced in businesses today. While working on an appliance with service provided by Virgin Media – the issue of remote access and management became apparent. For those not familiar with Virgin – the IP addresses allocated to the cable modems are psuedo-static i.e they stay the same for extended periods of time – potentially many months or even longer but are not guaranteed to remain static. Changes to equipment or service are likely to cause a change.
However I noticed in the documentation for the 10.6 firmware that Cyberoam now provide a solution to exactly this problem. The KB here covers the settings necessary but in summary you will find the option under network\Dynamic DNS in the UTM web management console. Click to add a DynDNS provider and select Cyberoam as the provider. This option does not require a username or password rather it uses the unique ID of the UTM to link to Cyberoam to acquire the dynamic dns hostname in the form yourhostname.ddns.cyberoam.com which you enter in the dialog box for this connection.
The final things to change are the refresh period – set it low (4 mins) while testing and increase it when you are up and running. The other important thing in this case is to change the IPV4 address option to NATed Public IP and save the configuration. Check the status page to see when the system has successfully communicated with the Cyberoam servers and then attempt connection using the yourhostname.ddns.cyberoam.com hostname you chose above.
A useful feature in this case – you can also use this with static ip addresses to have a consistent url for the units you own or manage.
Postscript : This was the 1000th post for this blog through its various names and locations – all thanks to the power of WordPress !!! Click here to see the first 🙂