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

Alternative preferred HA options

There is a reason for “preferred” being included in the heading of this section. Check Point offers ClusterXL with VRRP and Load Sharing using either multicast or unicast as HA modes; however, I cannot recommend them.

The negatives of both Load Sharing modes are perfectly described by Timothy Hall in his book, MAXPOWER: Check Point Firewall Performance Optimization. My experience with these offerings is aligned with his conclusions, and I will only briefly summarize them here:

  • Load Sharing Multicast stability is conditional and is based on the compatibility of adjacent routers. In many organizations, some of the routers are provisioned by peers or service providers. Chances are you will run into issues that will affect the stability of this solution sooner or later.
  • Load Sharing Unicast is inefficient, as one of the cluster members acts as a “pivot” and must forward traffic to other cluster members. This approach...