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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 - 1,282 views \\ tags: 5.2, counters, Feature Previews, firewall, Links, NAT, NAT rule, Policy, rule, rule tags, Shortcuts, 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 - 1,521 views \\ tags: 5.2, Drill-in, Feature Previews, firewall, logs, Shortcuts, SMC, troubleshooting, VPN, VPN diagrams

When you press Ctrl-T or press the new + icon on the tab row you will end up in a new launch pad view. That blank tab view contains links to different views in StoneGate Management Client and lists your bookmarks as well. This view provides a nice alternative for navigating in the StoneGate Management Client. Basically everything is reachable with just two-clicks.

The new blank tab biew contains also your personal bookmarks. Using bookmarks can really save your time. You can bookmark any view you want in StoneGate Managent Client to make it easily reachable afterwards. One nice way of using bookmarks is to create bookmarks to pre-filtered logs. When creating log bookmarks, you can unselect “Query Time Range” option. Then system always opens the latest logs but still takes filters, sender and datatype selections into account when opening the bookmark.

One more small enhancement to the tabs… You can now reorganize the tabs in the Management Client just by drag & dropping them to the desired order. Thanks again for the feedback!

written by Tero Jantunen - 841 views \\ tags: 5.2, bookmarks, Feature Previews, launch pad, Shortcuts, SMC, tabs

We have noticed that a lot of StoneGate administrators are constantly inquiring the country, city, organization information from these web portals:

• http://www.ripe.net/
• http://www.arin.net/whois/
• http://www.afrinic.net/cgi-bin/whois
• http://wq.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl
• http://www.lacnic.net/cgi-bin/lacnic/whois

In order to save administrator’s time, StoneGate 5.2 has now integrated whois action. You can right-click any IP address in logs, statistics or reports. The results of whois query are displayed in a separate info dialog.

written by Tero Jantunen - 820 views \\ tags: 5.2, Feature Previews, ip address, Monitoring, Shortcuts, SMC, troubleshooting, whois

Let’s begin the feature previews with a cool nice search feature you can utilize in all element lists & tables throughout the StoneGate Management Center (SMC). In SMC 5.2 you can just put focus to the element list and start typing any keyword. The system automatically looks for substring match from Name, IP, Comment and many other fields and filters away all the rows that don’t match your keyword.

In big environments there typically are thousands of host and network elements. With the help of the new type ahead search you can quickly find the correct elements from the long element lists without touching the vertical scroll bar. Note that this instant type ahead search is available also in dialogs where the space for selecting the elements is very limited (for example when selecting elements to be included in the Group element).

Once you’ll try it – you’ll love it!

written by Tero Jantunen - 707 views \\ tags: 5.2, elements, Feature Previews, search, Shortcuts, SMC, usability

As you know there are multiple ways how to visualize the log data with StoneGate Management Client. You have probably noticed the “Statistics” shortcuts in the Log Browser’s toolbar already. Here is another convenient way to find more log statistics shortcuts:

Just right-click any column header in the Log Browser and select some of the log statistics shortcuts from the menu that opens. Note that these shortcuts are all related to the column you originally selected.

A picture is worth a thousand words! Log Statistics provide you efficient tools to drill in to the relevant pieces of log data.

written by Tero Jantunen - 1,099 views \\ tags: Log Statistics, logs, Shortcuts, SMC, Tips & Tricks

In SMC 5.0 there is one new shortcut that speeds up the daily administration tasks a bit. You can namely create new hosts wherever you see IP addresses. Just right-click that IP address and select “New Host” action from the menu that opens. This is a nice shortcut when you recognize some IP from the logs and you know you need to use a host element with that IP later e.g. in a security policy.

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written by Tero Jantunen - 1,166 views \\ tags: logs, New Host, Shortcuts, SMC, Tips & Tricks