Checkpoint VE R71 Failed to Load Security Policy: No such file or directory

I use Checkpoint VE R71 clusters on ESXi to host bespoke cloud solutions for a number of customers. 

This week I had an irritating problem where after a reboot of the passive firewall it was unable to fetch a policy from the management server.

No amount of cpstop/cpstarts, manual fetches and reboots helped.

The error message was as follows.

fw fetch 10.10.10.10

Fetching Security Policy From: 10.10.10.10

Installing Security Policy vfw1 on all.all@ vfw1

 Failed to Load Security Policy: No such file or directory

 Failed to Load Security Policy: No such file or directory

 Fetching Security Policy Failed

The firewall was able to ping its ESX host, the virtual centre server and the firewall management station..

The solution in the end was to run sysconfg and take the “Configure vSphere connection settings” option. Then run through the establishing the connection to the Virtual Centre server again. 

Once this was done, fetching a policy worked.

I am assuming somehow the firewall was unable to authenticate itself to the virtual centre server by losing the cached copy of the certificate?

No one I have spoken to is sure why when operating in “network mode” not “hypervisor mode” the firewall needs to talk to the virtual centre server at all. If I had to guess I would say it need this for licensing..

Anyway, hope this helps someone.

Mat.