Book Image

Troubleshooting NetScaler

By : Raghu Varma Tirumalaraju
Book Image

Troubleshooting NetScaler

By: Raghu Varma Tirumalaraju

Overview of this book

NetScaler is a high performance Application Delivery Controller (ADC). Making the most of it requires knowledge that straddles the application and networking worlds. As an ADC owner you will also likely be the first person to be solicited when your business applications fail. You will need to be quick in identifying if the problem is with the application, the server, the network, or NetScaler itself. This book provides you with the vital troubleshooting knowledge needed to act fast when issues happen. It gives you a thorough understanding of the NetScaler layout, how it integrates with the network, and what issues to expect when working with the traffic management, authentication, NetScaler Gateway and application firewall features. We will also look at what information to seek out in the logs, how to use tracing, and explore utilities that exist on NetScaler to help you find the root cause of your issues.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Troubleshooting NetScaler
Credits
Notice
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Configuring logging


Logs are crucial when troubleshooting AppFirewall issues. For AppFirewall to log any requests when one of the configured protections receives a hit, logging needs to be enabled for that specific protection. These logs are written to /var/log/ns.log. In the interest of preserving them for longer than the NetScaler logging process permits, you can also consider sending them to a syslog server through a syslog policy.

Logging works independent of blocking. To explain this, consider the following screenshot:

As a result of this configuration:

  • CSRF violations will both be blocked and all blocking will be logged

  • XSS attacks will not be blocked but you will still see log entries to warn you

  • SQL injection attacks will be blocked silently (not useful if you are trying to troubleshoot)

Note

Note that AppFirewall also supports CEF (Common Event Format) logging, a popular open standard for logging. Using CEF logging helps when you want to use third-party applications to aggregate your...