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In large geographically distributed environments it is interesting to monitor the status by site. Now there is a new way to do this with SMC 5.2. First you need to tag your monitored elements with Geolocation elements. After this, you will see “Geolocation” branch in the Status tree in System Status view. If you select any Geolocation from the tree, you will see on the map where it is located and what is the status of the site. You can also expand the element on the map to see the status of individual elements belonging to this site.

Setting the Geolocation this way for your private elements brings also other benefits. You can e.g. monitor the statistics as a Geolocation map and see e.g. how the VPN traffic is currently distrubuted in your environment.

written by Tero Jantunen - 1,468 views \\ tags: 5.2, Diagrams, Feature Previews, Geolocations, Map, Monitoring, SMC, Status, System Status

Third Party Monitoring feature was originally published in StoneGate 5.0 version and it got already many new configuration options in StoneGate 5.1. Surprise, surprise we have continued improving the Third Party Log Event management features even further in StoneGate 5.2.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,805 views \\ tags: 3rd party devices, 5.2, Feature Previews, Logging Profiles. Syslog, Monitoring, SMC, SNMP traps, Third-Party Monitoring

When introducing StoneGate for a new customer there usually is first just some written security policy e.g. in Excel that describes the IP addresses, IP ranges and network addresses needed for configuring the environment. Now in StoneGate 5.2 you can take that as starting point and save it as CSV or txt format and import your file directly to SMC. The system then auto-generates all the elements that are defined in the input file. This is a very convenient tool when you need to create hundreds or thousands of network elements.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,478 views \\ tags: 5.2, Autogenerate elements, CSV, elements, Feature Previews, import, SMC, Text file

With StoneGate 5.2 you can save your log records to Local Archive Zip file. Just multi-select the records or define the time range and select Export – Export Log Events… from the right-click menu. That dialog contains now new option to save the log entries as zip file (in addition to XML, CSV and Archive).

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,126 views \\ tags: 5.2, export, Feature Previews, Log Archive, logs, SMC, Zip

Connection and Blacklist monitoring have been refactored in StoneGate 5.2. At the same time when making these functions more reliable, improved the communication protocol between the SMC and engines and increased the connection table update interval, we have introduced a couple of nice features for these two views. Read more information below about how Connection and Blacklist Monitoring have been improved.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,314 views \\ tags: 5.2, Aggregation, Blacklist Monitoring, Connection Monitoring, Feature Previews, firewall, IPS, Monitoring, SMC, Snapshots, statistics

This is just a small change but still something that probably interests the existing StoneGate customers. StoneGate severities have traditionally been expressed as numbers from 1-10. According to customer feedback the numerical scale has been a bit difficult to remember and recognize. That’s why the numbers are now replaced with textual severities “Critical”, “High”, “Low” and “Info”. Textual severity label with color-coded icons helps also visual browsing of logs and situations. You can quickly find the critical rows among the less important rows.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 938 views \\ tags: 5.2, alerts, Feature Previews, Severities, Situations, SMC

During the last two years we have received feedback from Gartner as well as some customers that StoneGate IPS is surely efficient but it is a bit difficult to configure inspection rules for the device. The other feedback we have noticed in customer interviews is that administrators are not aware of all StoneGate’s inspection capabilities. Administrators don’t seem to have time to configure and manage Inspection rules as granular way as for managing the FW access rules.

In StoneGate 5.2 we have now answered your needs. There is a brand new way of configuring inspection rules with the help of a new Inspection Rules panel. Read more how to configure the Inspection rules with SMC 5.2.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,391 views \\ tags: 5.2, False positives, Feature Previews, firewall, Inspection, Inspection configuration, Inspection rules, IPS, Situations, SMC

Link aggregation or “network interface bonding” in linux terms, means a standard way to aggregate multiple physical network interfaces as a one. StoneGate firewalls will have a support for aggregated interfaces starting from version 5.2.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,450 views \\ tags: 5.2, Feature Previews, firewall, High Availability, Interface configuration, Link aggregation, load balancing, SMC

In big environments where you have multiple administrators you often end up having duplicate elements with same IP address. StoneGate Management Center (SMC) has warned about duplicate IPs during element creation for years. But now in SMC 5.2 there is also a new clean-up tool for administrators to get rid off duplicate elements.

You can find this tool by selecting File – System Tools – Search Duplicate IPs.

Note that sometimes it is reasonable to have duplicate elements that have the same IP. But this new tool is supposed to help you to find the elements that could be merged.

written by Tero Jantunen - 1,215 views \\ tags: 5.2, cleanup, Duplicate elements, Feature Previews, IP, search, SMC

IPv6 support for StoneGate IPS was introduced already a couple of years ago in StoneGate 4.3. IPv6 support has now been extended to cover also Firewalls. You can now use IPv6 addresses in FW interface configuration, configure IPv6 Routing and define the IPv6 Access Policy with the help of IPv6 hosts and, networks and address ranges.

There are still some remaining tasks related to IPv6 support. Those include support for IPv6 clustering, IPv6 protocol agents and IPv6 NAT policies. These remaining enhancements are already in StoneGate roadmap and currently scheduled to version 5.3 (Q1/2011).

written by Tero Jantunen - 2,108 views \\ tags: 5.2, Feature Previews, firewall, IPv6, SMC