Chapter 7. Remote Management

Large organizations often require multiple firewalls in order to keep the network secure. The ability to manage all these firewalls from a central place is desirable, as is the ability to manage the firewalls from anywhere. FireWall-1 offers this ability via a centralized management module, which Check Point calls SmartCenter in its current marketing, and GUIs that run on Solaris and Microsoft Windows?called SmartConsole. Often, in smaller environments, the firewall and management module are on the same box. This configuration masks a lot of the complexity and power of FireWall-1.

This chapter explains each of these components in detail and how they interact with one another. Remote management is then discussed. Topics in this area include the ability to manage one or more remote firewalls from a single management module, scenarios that might arise (including management module migration), and troubleshooting suggestions for these configurations.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Understand the different components of FireWall-1 and how they interact

• Effectively manage several remote firewall modules

• Move your management module from one host to another

• Troubleshoot common problems with remote management