SonicWall Firewall + No Experience = PITA

I dont think you will be wasting time. You will gain some general expirience in networking. Offcourse their are differences in the 2 appliances but thats mainly in extra functionality and where they place stuff in their gui.

Although I've learned quite a bit since posting this, I still feel pretty lost. I've watched many youtube videos and read all kinds of stuff online, but have no confidence in what I've learned. What makes it difficult is that while I have the appliance and can play with it, I have no servers and real network to use with it, so it's like grasping at the wind.

Do you have experience with the SonicWall firewalls? If so, can I ask you some stupid questions?

With Virtualbox you can setup a testlab with networkservers and workstations. This way you can give them the subnets, ip adresses, etc...   to accomplish what you want.

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