Your chance to get creative

Ok guys - here is your chance to get creative. I am gonna lay it out for ya first:

At my office, we have a hardware firewall that keeps needing to be reset. After much beef with the support people, we have just decided to try to get around this problem ourselves. Everytime the firewall kicks off, I have to drive 30 minutes back to work and manually reset the thing (i.e. unplug it and then plug it back in). The reason I have to come in is because we are using OWA and we have to be able to hit or email from home.

Now, we are thinking of ways that we can reset the damn thing from home.
1) My supervisor thinks we need to route it through a computer with a dial-up modem ( basically a DTMF system ) and somehow configure it so we can just reset the hardware firewall with a press of a button over the phone. - So how would I go about setting this up and doing it?
2) Would it be possible to setup an UPS under the firewall that is connected to a Server via USB, somehow connect to the server via a home computer, and reset it like that? Yet again, how would I do this
3) And finally, what would you guys do here? Please help and any feedback would be kickin'!!

 

I have no idea how to go about it with the computer, BUT!
Lowes and Home Depot sells devices that you can call on the phone to turn your lights on or off. Not sure how far you have to get into it before you got to that option but from what I've seen all the stuff is fairly cheap. Instead of a light you have a firewall, on-off is all the device knows and that's all you need it to know, right.

 

Is the firewall completely unresponsive when it needs resetting, or is it just not letting traffic through?

What I'm getting at, is can you telnet into it from the outside and reboot it from a command line?

Also, do you have any idea why it needs rebooting? We have a Cisco router used as a firewall here that would sometimes fall over because virus type traffic was pushing the CPU in the router to 100%. A reboot would clear it until the next time it happened. We got the virus on the network cleared up and it's been fine since.

To be honest, spending money on gadgets to power the device off every night isn't the right thing to do in my mind. However, if you are going to go that route, why not just buy a $10 time switch to power it off at a certain time every night?

 

(and back on, obviously!)