What failover times do you expect from a network security device that claims to have high availability? 1 ms? Or at least <1 second? Not so for a fully featured Infoblox HA cluster which takes about 1-2 minutes, depending on its configuration. Yep. “Works as designed”. Ouch. Some details:
Continue reading Infoblox Failover Debacle (Works as Designed)
I got an email where someone asked whether I know how to change the link-local IPv6 addresses on a FortiGate similar to any other network/firewall devices. He could not find anything about this on the Fortinet documentation nor on Google.
Well, I could not find anything either. What’s up? It’s not new to me that you cannot really configure IPv6 on the FortiGate GUI, but even on the CLI I couldn’t find anything about changing this link-local IPv6 address from the default EUI-64 based one to a manually assigned one. Hence I opened a ticket at Fortinet. It turned out that you cannot *change* this address at all, but that you must *add* another LL address which will be used for the router advertisements (RA) after a reboot (!) of the firewall. Stupid design!
Continue reading Trying to change an IPv6 Link-Local Address on a FortiGate
If you’re following my blog you probably know that I am using IPv6 everywhere. Everything in my lab is dual-stacked if not already IPv6-only. Great so far.
A few months ago my lab moved to another ISP which required to change all IP addresses (since I don’t have PI space yet). Oh boy! While it was almost no problem to change the legacy IPv4 addresses (only a few NATs), it was a huge pain in the … to change the complete infrastructure with its global unicast IPv6 addresses. It turned out that changing the interface IPv6 addresses was merely the first step, while many modifications at different services were the actual problem. And this was *only* my lab and not a complex company or the like.
Following you find a list of changes I made for IPv6 and for legacy IP. Just an overview to get an idea of differences and stumbling blocks.
In some situations, you want to manage your firewall only from a dedicated management network and not through any of the data interfaces. For example, when you’re running an internal data center with no Internet access at all but your firewalls must still be able to get updates from the Internet. In those situations, you need a real out-of-band (OoB) management interface from which all management traffic (DNS, NTP, Syslog, Updates, RADIUS, …) is sourced and to which the admins can connect to via SSH/HTTPS. Another example is a distinct separation of data and management traffic. For example, some customers want any kind of management traffic to traverse through some other routing/firewall devices than their production traffic.
Unfortunately, the Fortinet FortiGate firewalls don’t have a reasonable management port. Their so-called “MGMT” port is only able to limit the access of incoming traffic but is not able to source outgoing traffic by default. Furthermore, in an HA environment you need multiple ports to access the firewalls independently. What a mess. (Little exception: You can use the set ha-direct enable option in the HA setup which sources *some* but not all protocols from the Mgmt interface. But only when you’re using a HA scenario. Reference.)
A functional workaround is to add another VDOM solely for management. From this VDOM, all management traffic is sourced. To have access to all firewalls in a high availability environment, a second (!) interface within this management VDOM is necessary. Here we go:
We needed to configure the Internet-facing firewall for a customer to block encrypted files such as protected PDF, ZIP, or Microsoft Office documents. We tested it with two next-generation firewalls, namely Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto Networks. The experiences were quite different…
Continue reading File Blocking Shootout – Palo Alto vs. Fortinet
Implementing DNSSEC for a couple of years now while playing with many different DNS options such as TTL values, I came around an error message from DNSViz pointing to possible problems when the TTL of a signed resource record is longer than the lifetime of the DNSSEC signature itself. Since I was not fully aware of this (and because I did not run into a real error over the last years) I wanted to test it more precisely.
Anstelle von technischen Details heute mal ein Erfahrungsbericht. Vielleicht sollte ich eher sagen: ein Odysseebericht. Für einen meiner Kunden habe ich den Business-Internetanschluss umgezogen. “Einfache Sache”, so dachte ich anfangs, zumal der alte und neue Anschluss beide bei dem gleichen Anbieter liegen: der Telekom. Von einem “Company Connect” der T-Systems (ok, doch nicht exakt Telekom) hin zu einem DeutschlandLAN Connect IP.
Es war fürchterlich:
Continue reading Internetanschlusswechsel innerhalb der Telekom: Ein Albtraum
I really like the FortiGate firewalls. They are easy to manage and have lots of functionality. However, I am also aware of some other firewall products and therefore have some feature requests to Fortinet that are not currently implemented in their firewalls. I am sometimes forwarding these FRs to the Fortinet support or to a SE, but they are not really interested in that. ;( So here is a list of my ideas that could improve the firewall. Hopefully/maybe some of them will be implemented one day…
I had an error on my PA-200 with PAN-OS 7.0.5 while trying to download a new firmware version. “Error: There is not enough free disk space to complete the desired operation. […]”. Even the tips to delete older software, dynamic updates, etc., and to use the “set max-num-images count” command did not lead to a successful download.
Finally, the TAC support could solve the problem via root access to the Palo Alto firewall and by manually moving data files…
Migrating from Juniper ScreenOS firewalls to FortiGates, there are some differences to note with static NATs, i.e., Mapped IPs (MIPs) on a Netscreen and Virtual IPs (VIPs) on a FortiGate. While the Juniper MIPs on an interface are always used by the firewall whenever a packet traverses the interface, the virtual IP objects on a FortiGate must be used at least once in the security policy before they are really used by the firewall.
I am lucky to have a full dual-stack ISP connection at home. However, the ISP only offers a dynamic IPv6 prefix with all of its disadvantages (while no single advantage). In this post, I am summarizing the limitations of a dynamic prefix and some of the ideas on how to overcome them. I am always comparing the “IPv6 dynamic prefix” state with the legacy “dynamic IPv4 address” situation. I suppose that some of these problems will hit many small office / home office locations during the next years.
Of course, IPv6 ISP connections with dynamic prefixes should only be purchased at private home sites. It is no problem to have new IPv6 addresses there because all connections are outbound. However, many small remote offices (SOHO) might rely on such cheap ISP connections, too. If they provide some servers in a DMZ or other components such as network cameras, building components with IPv6 connections, etc., they will run into these kind of problems. (The remote office could even tunnel every outbound IPv6 traffic through a VPN to the headquarter. But if it wants to use a local breakout, this won’t be an alternative.)
Cisco ASA 9.4 (and later) is now supporting Policy Based Routing. Yeah. Great news, since many customers are requesting something like “HTTP traffic to the left – VoIP traffic to the right”. Coming with a new Cisco ASA 5506-X I was happy to try the policy based routing feature.
The configuration steps through the ASDM GUI are not easy and full of errors so I am trying to give some hints within this blog post.
When working with Cisco devices anyone knows that the output of a “show running-config” on one device can be used to completely configure a new device. On a Palo Alto Networks firewall, this is not that obvious. There are several commands that must be used to achieve the same.
However, I tested this procedure a few times and it did NOT work. :( So, the short version is: If you want to replace a Palo Alto firewall, move your configuration files (xml) through the GUI or tftp/scp. But do not use the mere CLI.