Book Image

Check Point Firewall Administration R81.10+

By : Vladimir Yakovlev
Book Image

Check Point Firewall Administration R81.10+

By: Vladimir Yakovlev

Overview of this book

Check Point firewalls are the premiere firewalls, access control, and threat prevention appliances for physical and virtual infrastructures. With Check Point’s superior security, administrators can help maintain confidentiality, integrity, and the availability of their resources protected by firewalls and threat prevention devices. This hands-on guide covers everything you need to be fluent in using Check Point firewalls for your operations. This book familiarizes you with Check Point firewalls and their most common implementation scenarios, showing you how to deploy them from scratch. You will begin by following the deployment and configuration of Check Point products and advance to their administration for an organization. Once you’ve learned how to plan, prepare, and implement Check Point infrastructure components and grasped the fundamental principles of their operation, you’ll be guided through the creation and modification of access control policies of increasing complexity, as well as the inclusion of additional features. To run your routine operations infallibly, you’ll also learn how to monitor security logs and dashboards. Generating reports detailing current or historical traffic patterns and security incidents is also covered. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge necessary to implement and comfortably operate Check Point firewalls.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Check Point, Network Topology, and Firewalls in Your Infrastructure and Lab
6
Part 2: Introduction to Gaia, Check Point Management Interfaces, Objects, and NAT
13
Part 3: Introduction to Practical Administration for Achieving Common Objectives

Chapter 14: Working with ClusterXL High Availability

One of the first objects we created in our lab was a cluster consisting of two gateways. Generally, the term cluster is applied to a group of computers performing identical tasks. High-availability (HA) clusters are those that are designed to provide fault tolerance, maintaining uninterrupted functionality in the case of a failure of one or more of their members. Our cluster is running in HA mode, and it is time for us to take a closer look at how it works and at a few tools that we can use for its routine maintenance, diagnostics, and operation.

Considering the importance of firewalls and threat prevention gateways in any environment, often, it is imperative to assure their survivability in case of hardware failure, partial power loss, or connectivity loss. This is where fault tolerance in the form of HA is required.

Check Point offers several ways to achieve HA. After seeing how ClusterXL High Availability mode works, we...