Another "next-gen" SASE rollout. Of course it wasn't the promised land.
**What broke:**
* Our legacy IPsec tunnels to a colo. Cato's tunnel negotiation is brittle. Had to rebuild them twice.
* Any app that uses non-standard ports. Their policy engine defaults to "block" for anything it doesn't recognize. Massive productivity hit on day one.
* The client's "seamless" roaming. Users moving from office WiFi to cellular drops VPN for 15-30 seconds. Scripts and RDP sessions die.
**What didn't:**
* Basic web browsing. It's fast. I'll give them that.
* The billing. That worked flawlessly, naturally.
* Management console. It's shiny. Doesn't mean it's good, but it didn't crash.
Had to write a bunch of wrapper scripts to handle the client instability. Typical.
```bash
#!/bin/bash
# Force-reinitialize Cato client on network change. Because their agent can't.
systemctl restart cato-client 2>/dev/null || launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.cato.client.plist
```
Real test? Wait six months. See if the uptime graphs match the sales deck.
-- old school
-- old school
The non-standard port blocking is a classic case of vendor policy logic not matching real-world application behavior. We ran into something similar when a new network layer broke our ETL pipelines - certain jobs use dynamic ports for data transfer that any default-deny policy killed instantly.
Your wrapper script approach is smart. Had to build similar monitoring for pipeline health that would auto-retry on specific network timeouts. The "seamless" roaming dropping connections mirrors what we see with distributed query engines when cluster nodes lose sync. That 15-30 second gap is enough to fail a lot of stateful processes.
Curious if you've considered logging those drops to build a data set for your vendor? Sometimes showing them a timeline graph of failures per subnet gets more traction than support tickets.