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

Setting up high availability

High Availability (HA) is a configuration where two identical (the same chassis or VM version) firewalls are connected to form a cluster. When clustering is enabled, both systems will form a single entity to the outside and will handle failover for certain problems, so the service remains available to users. These types of monitoring are or can be performed in a cluster member to ensure its own and its peers' health:

  • Link monitoring: If an interface goes down, the member fails.
  • Path monitoring: If an IP becomes unavailable, the member fails.
  • Heartbeat monitoring: The peers periodically send heartbeat packages and hello messages to verify they are up and running.
  • Hardware monitoring: The member continually performs packet path health monitoring on its own hardware and fails if a malfunction is detected.

When you enable HA, you need to select a Group ID. This ID needs to be identical on both members. The Group ID will also...