[speculatrix]

well, good news. another department had Acronis backup/clone utility, so we got hold of another DL380 and cloned the entire system onto it (Acronis, you're magic, I highly commend you!!)

We then looked for "fwauth.ndb*" across all disks and found that there were loads of such files. We then played around a lot, and noticed in one particular directory (\windows\f1\r60\fw1\conf) there was an fwauth.ndbbkp, and fwauth.ndb354.

Along the way we renamed the ndb354 to ndb354_, and took a copy of ndbbkp and called it fwauth.ndb354. You have to stop the firewall service in the services control panel before doing this.

This worked, so we wiped the clone, restored it from the acronis image, and did the minimum fix, and everything seemed ok... including the revision database system.

We then applied this fix to our live management console and it worked!

However, trying to use the revision system then broke the rule base and it wouldn't display rules, but luckily reverting to the just-saved revision made it work. So, we will have to go back to the old procedure (dating back to the guys who started here with CP v4.1) of simply saving policies with a date-stamp name.

Note that if you do this, you do so at your own risk. Also, when we invoked our support contract with our vendor, asking about all these numbered fwauth.ndb files and could we fix our dashboard through hacking files, they didn't say we could - got no advice about it (they said to restore from backup), so this is either unknown to Checkpoint or at least totally unapproved hacking!