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

Chapter 11: Troubleshooting Common Session Issues

In this chapter, we will learn how to read session output and how to troubleshoot basic session issues. We will learn how to use the tools available in the web interface to find problems and test policies. We will go over the steps to collect all the information you need to find out why a session may not be working as expected or predict how a new rule will react to certain sessions. We will also look at a powerful user tool called Maintenance Mode or the Maintenance Recovery Tool (MRT), which allows some very powerful system-level interactions with the firewall.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Using the tools available in the web interface
  • Interpreting session details
  • Using the troubleshooting tool
  • Using Maintenance Mode to resolve and recover from system issues