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

Using maintenance mode to resolve and recover from system issues

The MRT, also called Maintenance Mode, resides on a separate bootable partition and can be invoked if the system has an unexpected failure. If, for example, the system is unable to complete the auto-commit process, it will reboot to try and rectify what is causing the failure. If after three reboots the auto-commit is still failing, the system will boot into maintenance mode.

If the system failed, you can SSH into the device using the maint username and the serial number of the device as the password. If you connect to the console, you don't need a username and password.

You can force the system to boot into maintenance mode from the command line by executing the following command. The system will ask whether you want to reboot after you hit Enter:

> debug system maintenance-mode

You can also manually start Maintenance Mode. During the boot process, there is a short window where a dialog asks whether...