Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By : Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'
Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

To safeguard against security threats, it is crucial to ensure that your organization is effectively secured across networks, mobile devices, and the cloud. Palo Alto Networks’ integrated platform makes it easy to manage network and cloud security along with endpoint protection and a wide range of security services. With this book, you'll understand Palo Alto Networks and learn how to implement essential techniques, right from deploying firewalls through to advanced troubleshooting. The book starts by showing you how to set up and configure the Palo Alto Networks firewall, helping you to understand the technology and appreciate the simple, yet powerful, PAN-OS platform. Once you've explored the web interface and command-line structure, you'll be able to predict expected behavior and troubleshoot anomalies with confidence. You'll learn why and how to create strong security policies and discover how the firewall protects against encrypted threats. In addition to this, you'll get to grips with identifying users and controlling access to your network with user IDs and even prioritize traffic using quality of service (QoS). The book will show you how to enable special modes on the firewall for shared environments and extend security capabilities to smaller locations. By the end of this network security book, you'll be well-versed with advanced troubleshooting techniques and best practices recommended by an experienced security engineer and Palo Alto Networks expert.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: First Steps and Basic Configuration
4
Section 2: Advanced Configuration and Putting the Features to Work
10
Section 3: Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Chapter 5: Services and Operational Modes

Most networks have some supporting services to ensure users don't need to configure their laptop, mobile, or workstation to get access to corporate resources or the internet. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) helps users connect to a network by assigning them an IP address and several other settings. The Domain Name System (DNS) allows them to visit websites with a friendly name. Rather than needing to stand up a server at each location, we will be configuring the firewall to provide these services.

High-availability clustering and virtualization make deployments more resilient to failure and assure businesses can go on, even if something breaks. We will be setting up high availability and reviewing implications for using both Active/Passive mode, and Active/Active mode. We will also take a deeper look at using virtual systems on a chassis to logically split up network segments.

In this chapter, we're going to cover...