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There are a couple of new session monitoring views in StoneGate Management Center 5.3.0. One of them is the live monitoring view of authenticated users. It lists all the users that have authenticated themselves against the firewall by using the captive portal or IPsec VPN Client.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,650 views \\ tags: 5.3, authentication, Feature Previews, firewall, Monitoring, SMC, Users

StoneGate Firewall and SMC 5.3 will provide an integrated, easy-to-use web authentication for end users. This Captive HTTP/HTTPS authentication portal provides an easy way for the end users to authenticate themselves to access some service behind the firewall. The feature works well together with User & User Group based access control that is also released in StoneGate 5.3.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,538 views \\ tags: 5.3, authentication, Captive Portal, Feature Previews, firewall, SMC, Users, Web

StoneGate Firewall and SMC 5.3 are capable for dynamically identify the applications from the traffic. From now on the administrators can use Application elements directly in a service cell of policy access rules. Applications are also visible in the logs, statistics and reports. Now you can actually see which user is using which application from SMC if you want.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,208 views \\ tags: 5.3, Applications, Feature Previews, firewall, SMC, SSL, TLS

As you have noticed the flexibility of policy configuration has increased in StoneGate Management Center 5.3. One of the most efficient enhancements on that side, is the ability to use Zones in policies. Zone is a tag that you can assign to any physical or VLAN interface of a firewall. You can use the Zones in Source and Destination cells in Access Rules and NAT rules.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,066 views \\ tags: 5.3, access rule, Feature Previews, firewall, Interface, Interface configuration, Policy, SMC, Zone

In addition to Users and User Groups, StoneGate Management Center and Firewall 5.3 lets administrators to use Domain Name elements in Source and Destination cells in Access, Inspection and NAT rules. This is convenient if you need to allow access for servers like update.microsoft.com, which IP may change frequently.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,326 views \\ tags: 5.3, Access control, Domain Names, Domains, Feature Previews, firewall, Policies, SMC

StoneGate Management Center 5.3 and StoneGate Firewall 5.3 allows to use Users and User Group elements directly in Source and Destination cells in Access, Inspection and NAT rules. The Firewall is now able to resolve the IP address for the users dynamically without authentication. IP addresses for Users are sent by StoneGate User Agent installed at any server that is in the same domain as Active Directory Server.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,491 views \\ tags: 5.3, Access control, Active Directory, AD, Feature Previews, firewall, SMC, User Groups, Users

StoneGate 5.3 will be released within a couple of months. It contains a lot of interesting features. We thought we could reveal some information about them here in StoneBlog before you can try the new features in action. The theme for this release has been “Authentication and user and application awareness”. But as usual, there are a lot of other features and enhancements related to other topics as well.

Stay tuned and see what you can expect from the near future. The first feature previews will be published within a couple of days and we will keep on publishing them until the release is out.

written by Tero Jantunen - 871 views \\ tags: 5.3, Applications, authentication, Feature Previews, Features, firewall, SMC, Users

In many environments Network Address Translation (NAT) seems to be very extensively used. That has resulted in hundreds or even thousands of NAT rules in Firewall Policies. To help managing all these NAT rules, we have now introduce two nice features that you may have already used in Access Rules side.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,486 views \\ tags: 5.2, counters, Feature Previews, firewall, Links, NAT, NAT rule, Policy, rule, rule tags, Shortcuts, SMC

The limits are valid per Source or Destination address. So if there are multiple Source or Destination addresses used in the policy, the limit applies to all of them separately. As you can see from the snapshot above, you can limit the connections by source and destination simultaneously.

written by Tero Jantunen - 918 views \\ tags: 5.2, Connection limiting, Connections, Feature Previews, firewall, Limit, Policy, rules, SMC

In StoneGate Management Center 5.2 the VPN troubleshooting tools have improved significantly. There are a lot of new drill-in actions available in System Status view. You can for example right-click any VPN tunnel in the VPN diagrams and drill-in to logs that flow through the selected tunnel. You can also right-click individual Gateways or Endpoints (from the Info panel) and drill-in to the related logs.

written by Tero Jantunen - 1,796 views \\ tags: 5.2, Drill-in, Feature Previews, firewall, logs, Shortcuts, SMC, troubleshooting, VPN, VPN diagrams