After how woefully lacking in detail for the novice in OS 10 switches the Dell documentation is below is a little snippet that can be used to configure your switches with what appears to be enough permission for PRTG (or a similar SNMP monitoring system) to keep an eye on them. After entering configuration mode a readonly view with a… Read more
Category: Networking
FreeIPA to Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall User-ID
Logs from the FreeIPA server can be used with the Syslog receiver function of a PAN NGFW to send username to IP address mappings into User-ID and in turn be used to create policies based on the users identity. To extract the data from the logs you will need the parser shown below. View the code on Gist. I could… Read more
Palo Alto Networks Captive Portal, long delay in loading – Sophos agent
In recently deploying the Captive Portal feature of a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) in testing we were finding Apple Macs take 120+ seconds to load the sign-in page. First thoughts jumped to the Apple Captive Network Assistance (CNA) feature not functioning correctly however this appeared to be a dead end. Some time and a few packet captures… Read more
CITC 2022 Integrating systems through their APIs
After a few years on hold it’s great to be back at CITC this time in the British Motor Museum. The video presentation covers a short (if speedy) introduction to Node-RED and it’s ability to integrate systems through their APIs. Demo 2 is of note and shows how a user visiting a malicious website can have their internet access revoked… Read more
Aruba Instant – PAN Syslog Parse Profile
A little treat that I hope will help someone at some point, for those with Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW) and Aruba Instant Wi-Fi you can forward syslog messages from the controller to the NGFW and parse them with the profile below to map users to IP addresses. There is plenty of information on syslog to User-ID at… Read more
EE (UK) fibre to the home (FTTH) on pfSense
Having recently moved home I have become a part of the privileged few (hopefully not for long) in the UK to have fibre-to-the-home (FTTH sometimes known as fibre-to-the-premises or FTTP). Not wanting to use the EE provided all in one modem/firewall/router/switch/access point I have a setup that uses the pre-installed BT Openreach Nokia modem (ONT) a pfSense firewall/router along with… Read more
Ruckus Cloudpath, using custom CSS
Ruckus Cloudpath is quickly turning into one of my favourite add-ons for a wireless network in a residential/University setting. It’s doing this by letting users bring all manner of ‘smart’ devices into an ‘enterprise grade’ network and connect them securely with a personal WPA2 pre shared key. Even better Cloudpath has loads of options for customizing the onboarding portal –… Read more
Processing Cortex XDR Syslog/CEF with Graylog
It’s a bit of an odd situation but sometimes you might want to take information from a cloud service in this case Cortex XDR from Palo Alto Networks and drag it into an on premise logging service. This guide will have a look at how to get this log data in as well as parse it such that you can… Read more
Using a Raspberry Pi (or any Linux PC) as a Serial Console Server
A handy trick I learnt recently from this video (ICX Serial Console Server with Raspberry Pi by Terry Henry) which I’ve condensed into this screenshot guide. In short the ‘screen’ command in Linux can be used to turn any device into a serial console server – very handy if you need ‘out of band’ access to the management console of… Read more
PAN-OS and Connections Per Second in PRTG
If you are looking to build out Zone Protection Profiles on your Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall then it can be handy to know just what your connections per second metrics look over time for each zone. Quite lucky Palo Alto Networks have a little (although not entirely descript) guide on where you can get this data – https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/pan-os/9-1/pan-os-admin/zone-protection-and-dos-protection/zone-defense/take-baseline-cps-measurements-for-setting-flood-thresholds/how-to-measure-cps.html…. Read more