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

Applying a DHCP client and DHCP server

In most offices, DHCP is the norm when it comes to setting clients up on the network, but for smaller offices, it can be difficult or expensive to set up a dedicated server to provide IP addresses, or your local ISP may require you to connect a DHCP client to their network before they're able to assign you an IP address and let you on the internet. Luckily, the firewall can also perform these duties. We will start by setting up the firewall as a DHCP client to a dynamic ISP.

DHCP client

To set a data plane interface up as a DHCP client, follow the same steps as you would to configure a regular Layer 3 interface, but set the IPv4 to DHCP Client:

  1. Edit the interface.
  2. Set the mode to Layer3.
  3. Select an appropriate zone and virtual router.
  4. Set the IPv4 to DHCP Client.

You can choose to accept the default route from the ISP, or set your own in the virtual router, and if you want, to send a hostname upstream (some...