Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks - Second Edition

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

Mastering Palo Alto Networks - Second Edition

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

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. This book is an end-to-end guide to configure firewalls and deploy them in your network infrastructure. You will see how to quickly set up, configure and understand the technology, and troubleshoot any issues that may occur. This book will serve as your go-to reference for everything from setting up to troubleshooting complex issues. You will learn your way around the web interface and command-line structure, understand how the technology works so you can confidently predict the expected behavior, and successfully troubleshoot any anomalies you may encounter. Finally, you will see how to deploy firewalls in a cloud environment, and special or unique considerations when setting them to protect resources. By the end of this book, for your configuration setup you will instinctively know how to approach challenges, find the resources you need, and solve most issues efficiently.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Interpreting session details

The log details tell you a lot about a session, but not everything. Sessions, while being processed, have several different parameters that only translate to how they are being processed at a particular moment in time.

One such caveat is when Log at Session Start is enabled on a security rule, a log will only appear once the first data packet is received rather than when the TCP handshake is completed. This means a session could already exist in the session table because the handshake completed successfully, without a log entry being generated because no data has been received yet.

The session table is made up of a finite number of session IDs, so session IDs end up getting reused after the available IDs have been cycled through.

There are seven different states that a session can be in:

  • Initial or INIT: A session that is ready and waiting to be used by a new flow is in the INIT state.
  • Opening: This is a transient state in...