Here's the situation:
Our company decided to switch our IpSec VPN to a more reliable software and hardware combination.
We wanted an easy way to deploy the clients to our workers.
After a research we fond that the Cisco ASA5510 would have meet our necessities: the SSL VPN method and the usage of the Cisco AnyConnect client (available for any major OS) were enough easy to use and deploy. So we bough two Cisco ASA 5510, we also bought the Security Plus licenses, with the main purpose of activate the Gigabit ethernet on the devices.
After the configuration and testing, we found that the whole system was working pretty good (we used the "free" two SSL connections), so we decided to buy the "AnyConnect Essentials" licenses for those ASA's, to expand the SSL connections and finally deploy the VPN.
Here the Odissey begins: we tought that purchasing an electronic license (it's not even a software you know, it only removes the "2 users" limit on the device, basically it is a unlocking code) would have required 24 hours or such. We were wrong.
We contacted the main Cisco reseller in UK (where our main office is based) that is "Insight UK" (according to Cisco website), to purchase those licenses.
- After a week of waiting, we didn't received anything (while our office workes were struggling without a reliable VPN).
- So we started to ask other resellers (believing that the problem were with "Insight"), but with a similar result: no license after another week.
- The second week so, i personally started to call almost a tenth of Cisco resellers all around the world (Uk, USA, Italy.. and such), but none of them were able to provide those licenses to US, claiming that CISCO were not delivering em to the distributors (without providing any reason).
- After 3 weeks i decided to call Cisco directly, inquiring them what's the problem with these licenses, they were unable to help me, and they continually invited me to contact the resellers/distributors (the same companies that i've contacted the previous two weeks).
- The original reseller (Insight) is helping us to solve the proble, but without any apparent result: Cisco is moving their request week by week without giving any reason.
- I've realized then that the problem is not about the resellers, but it's Cisco that is NOT giving those licenses.
Now almost a month is gone, we have our ASA's sitting there because Cisco is unable to provide us the license to use them (they neither told us the reason). I'm in the complicate situation (because i'm the person rensposable of having this up and running) of exposes the facts to the company management, giving em the reason of why i've decided to invest money into some hardware that we cannot use because the company that is producing this hardware is unable to give to us a such basic support. I have to accept the rensponsability to have wasted some thousand pounds, having no VPN in place, and have wasted my working time to setup and configure the devices, all because Cisco is unable to give to us some "unlocking codes": we purchased a car without the keys, neither we can buy those keys anywhere.
In the Year 2010, i never tought to being trapped into a situation like this, especially because we're talking about "technology": we're not planning a mission on Mars, we want to buy a 11 digits code.
Thank you.
