Book Image

Mastering NetScaler VPX

By : Marius Sandbu, Andy Paul
Book Image

Mastering NetScaler VPX

By: Marius Sandbu, Andy Paul

Overview of this book

Citrix NetScaler is one of the best Application Delivery Controller products in the world. The Application Delivery Controllers are commonly used for load balancing purposes, to optimize traffic, and to perform extra security settings. This book will give you an insight into all the available features that the Citrix NetScaler appliance has to offer. The book will start with the commonly used NetScaler VPX features, such as load balancing and NetScaler Gateway functionality. Next, we cover features such as Responder, Rewrite, and the AppExpert templates, and how to configure these features. After that, you will learn more about the other available Citrix technologies that can interact with Citrix NetScaler. We also cover troubleshooting, optimizing traffic, caching, performing protection using Application Firewall, and denying HTTP DDoS attacks for web services. Finally, we will demonstrate the different configuration principles real-world Citrix NetScaler deployment scenarios.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mastering NetScaler VPX™
Notice
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Management best practices for security


Before configuring NetScaler for any type of service, we should always ensure that NetScaler is locked down in way that management access can be brute-forced, MitM attacks for logging and so on. So as a best-practice we should:

  • Disable interfaces that are not used.

  • Do not start any features that we do not use.

  • Define a SNMP manager we can send alerts to. Prefer using SNMPv3, which allows for encrypted authentication and traffic.

  • Disable heartbeat monitoring on disabled interfaces in HA setup.

  • Change the nsroot password.

  • Set up external authentication access to NetScaler, which allows for AD group authentication to NetScaler and makes it easier to audit and control changes; it also restricts access. In order to set up this feature we can follow this Citrix article http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX123782. It is important to make sure that this feature is bound to a global level and that the nsroot account is marked as non-external authentication access...