1. Virtualbox Vs Vmware Player

But i am using VirtualBox instead of VMware. (i'll add the diagram once i reach home from work). The diagram: How do I figure out the 'VMnets' as keith uses them to connect to the VM installations from his own windows PC? I assign the 10 series IP to the checkpoint installation. Before you begin, download the ISO file with the R77 image for the Gaia operating system to your vSphere Client computer. To create a new R77 VM: In the VMware vSphere client, click File New Virtual Machine. The Create New Virtual Machine wizard opens. Select Custom Configuration.

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Virtualbox Vs Vmware Player

Contents. Background We are using Checkpoint firewalls in our customer networks at work and are heavily using SmartDashboard and other GUI based tools to manage these firewalls in a large datacenter environments (rulebase of 10k+ firewall rules!) because that is simply our internal standard. However recently there came a push to try to automate a certain aspects of configuring these firewalls because several customer wanted to achieve shorter lead-times at least on few aspects of firewall configurations. And since Checkpoint FWs do not support any real API for managing policies with it, it came down to CLI tools like dbedit, which we will explore here a little for the purpose of learning the practicalities of managing firewall policies with this tool. The firewall automation itself is out of scope of this article, but you should get the idea what needs to be done to achieve it after learning the basics of dbedit. Topology of our LAB and LAB components For this lab I was using and to create my small topology, but your should be perfectly fine to use vmWare workstation with only logical interfaces from it (the vmnetX interfaces it creates) to simulate the same logic, the focus here is to manipulate the FW rules with dbedit tool, so I am not even going to do FW cluster or install Domain Management Systems (MDS) as a typical Checkpoint production environment should have.

Checkpoint LAB topology, using R77.20 release installed inside VirtualBox VM host Checkpoint Components used In regards to Checkpoint software used here, I only used the 15 day trials as these are fully functional for this period and enough for a quick LAB. However even to download these, you need a partners account or any other checkpoint product, so here I need to ask you to check in what way you can download this software as for me it was easy thanks to my employer being a partner with Checkpoint so I have this access.

From the following download page for R77.20 of checkpoint: Step 1. Download. VMWare Virtual Machine OVF Template. SmartDashboard and other GUI management components for Windows Step 2. Unpack & Install R77.20 into VirtualBox VM Unpack the downloaded CheckPointSecurityGatewayR77.20T124OVFTemplateGaia.tgz, inside will be an OVF packaged virtual machine files that should be easy to import into VirtualBox or vmWare Workstation.

Please do so. Afterwards run the VM and follow install wizard. On this point you can do this even without GNS3 or other network around, but since in next steps immediately setting the interfaces, I recommend that you already put this VM in middle of your virtual network to test access to the VM interfaces. Basic CLI configuration of Checkpoint FW interfaces After your new VM firewall is booted, we are going to configure its interfaces with IPs as basic first step. I am going to use: eth1 – external bridge to GNS3 virtual LAN with 192.168.177.2/24 IP eth0 – internal “host only” adapter that will simulate our corporate intranet with 192.168.125.20/24 IP Open the checkpoint CLI console in VirtualBox and login with the default “admin” username and “admin” password.

Set interface eth1 state on Step 4. First time setup via WebGUI Simply open a browser, and go to and complete the first time configuration wizard. It will ask you for very basic things like what packages to install (Select all), if you are installing a Secure Gateway or MDS (here answer that you are installing Secure Gateway) and that this system is either not part or will be part of a VRRP cluster later. Simply try to push everything to as much stand-alone minimal firewall deployment possible. Setup initial routing, initial sample ruleset and simple NAT Step 5.1 IPv4 Static Route Routing is practically not needed here, but if nothing else please setup a default gateway (or default route) towards your external inteface next hope (the router on the other side0.

This is simply done via the WebGUI - Ipv4 Static Routes and add it, example below. Basic FW policy structure with managment / base rules / default rules / automated / non-automated and default DENY collector rules In the above ruleset I have created a sample rule (very primitive really) of what we use in production.

We have management rules first, then comes base rules (rules needed for servers to operate like logging), then default rules (used for each security zone like default flat access), then new section of automate rules that we want to later work with using dbedit/CLI. Followed by a section of non-automated rules and DENY ANY collector rule. See above the rule index numbers, from this vie it looks like rules are numbered from #1 to #7, however in the dbedit and CLI, these rules are practically indexed starting from #0, but allso the comment sections are using an index, which means that there rules will be in CLI later edited using indexes of #0 – #12 (the DENY ANY rule at the end is practically rule #12 in CLI!!). This can confuse very much so remember this from this point. Configure basic NAT rule to hide internal network behind external interface IP This is the same NAT (or in Cisco terminology PAT) that will hide the internal network behind behind this firewall. I used this because in both my LAB networks I didn’t wanted to change the routing for this exercise so everything that transits from internal 192.168.125.0/24 network to external networks is hidden behind the 192.168.177.2 IP of the eth1 interface of the FW. Configuring this is a single NAT rule, in the SmartDashboard top-left part, select the “NAT” section and create the following rule.

Expert @ checkpointvirtualGW: 0 # Step 7.Entering dbedit When you are in expert mode (check that your CLI prompt ends with “#” and you actually have many unix commands available), we can now enter the dbedit, You can use dbedit in two modes, interactive mode that we will use here, but there is also a batch processing mode where you can store your dbedit commands in a text file and then execute all at once using the “-f” parameter and the text file as argument. However in this guide we are going to use interactive mode (the default one).

Enter dbedit simply by typing dbedit in the CLI, you should get output similar to this. Dbedit #IMPORTANT!: I actually recommend that (and it is actually mandatory to edit FW policy) that you close any SmartDashboard sessions that you have with the checkpoint FW as dbedit needs an explicit lock on policy editing to do real work. To make this explicit, I recommend using dbedit always with parameter “-globallock” as in the example below, this will ask dbedit to make explicit lock of the policy editing to dbedit, this will fail if any other SmartDashboad and/or other dbedit sessions are running.

Dbedit Step 8. FINAL – dbedit exercises EXERCISE A – basic print examples dbedit is definitely not much user friendly when it comes to printing network objects or the fw policies using the CLI, therefore I actually recommend that you open a SmartDashboard, but in “read-only” mode to the FW so that you can search for object definitions and verify your policy changes with it in a much more visually friendly way.

Dbedit provides two basic print commands, print and printxml, they do the same only the output is in xml format with the second one. The syntax is roughly. Printxml For both however, you will have to learn some basic ways how dbedit calls various objects, when we get to editing in later excercises, you can get back to print commands and use it with the network objects we create later to display them. For now, the two examples you can try: dbedit print HFAKE1.1.1.1 note: the HFAKE1.1.1.1 is one of the host object definitions I have created during policy creation in previous steps, if you have somethign different, change this to any other object that you have in your policy. Type: host The second example you can try is to display the whole FW policy with: dbedit print fwpolicies ##Standard however this output is very long even for the policy shown in, so just for your comparison, is represented. EXERCISE B – disabling a simple rule from the policy Our first example of editing a policy we keep simple, I will simply disable the last “DENY ANY” rule in my policy. In SmartDashboard, the last rule is #7, however, as explained above, dbedit is indexing rules starting with 0 and also the section names are considered an indexed output from the policy, so if you count everything from the policy I have, the last rule is actually #12!!

You can doublecheck this using the print commands from previous excercise, but there is no index there, so you have to manually count the number of rules printed, what is error prone. As I said, dbedit was not meant for visual human readability. Dbedit modify fwpolicies ##Standard rule:12:disabled true dbedit updateall fwpolicies::##Standard Updated Successfully dbedit savedb Database saved successfully dbedit quit Expert@checkpointvirtualGW:0# fwm load Standard Installing policy on R77 compatible targets: Warning: Anti-Spoofing is not configured for some interfaces and gateways.

This will allow address spoofing through these gateways. Anti-Spoofing should be configured on the following objects: Gateway: checkpointvirtualGW, Interface: eth2 Gateway: checkpointvirtualGW, Interface: eth1 Gateway: checkpointvirtualGW, Interface: eth0 Standard.W: Security Policy Script generated into Standard.pf export Standard.Set: Compiled OK. Standard: Compiled OK.

Export Standard.Set: Compiled OK. Standard: Compiled OK. Installing Security Gateway policy on: checkpointvirtualGW. Security Gateway policy installed successfully on checkpointvirtualGW. Security Gateway policy installation complete Security Gateway policy installation succeeded for: checkpointvirtualGW. Rmelement networkobjects dbedithost group ' networkobjects: PC2host EXERCISE D – removing a rule, and adding a new rule at the end of policy We will continue to play with the last deny any rule for a little longer, we are now going to delete it, and then put it back (optionally with PERMIT ANY if you want).

Again, return back to the dbedit, to make this quicker I am now going to only show the commands needed and will minimize the text around it:). Remove the deny any rule with #12 dbedit rmbyindex fwpolicies ##Standard rule 12 in the usual way, do the updateall, savedb commands in dbedit, then exit dbedit and install policy from expert mode using the fwm load Standard. The result will be that in your policy the last rule will be removed. #creates empty rule at the end, you have to change the #12 to your rule base!!! Addelement fwpolicies ##Standard rule securityrule modify fwpolicies ##Standard rule:12:comments 'Deny All RULE - dbedit' modify fwpolicies ##Standard rule:12:disabled false addelement fwpolicies ##Standard rule:12:action dropaction:drop addelement fwpolicies ##Standard rule:12:src:' globals:Any addelement fwpolicies ##Standard rule:12:dst:' globals:Any addelement fwpolicies ##Standard rule:12:services:' globals:Any. FW policy with edited two rules in the middle of the policy EXERCISE E – Editing existing rule The last exercise here is that we will edit an existing rule by adding more network objects to the source and destination parts. #IMPORTANT!: If you are asking why were are not adding new rule to the middle of the policy then please note that this is not easily possible.

Dbedit is only capable of adding a new rule to the end of the policy, this means that if you have a ruleset of five rules (#0-#4) and you want to enter a new rule that will be, lets say, second (#2), you need to delete rules #2-#4, add your rule and then re-create the deleted rules again as new rules #3-#5 behind your newly inserted rule #2. Let’s now do something like editing an existing rule and I will use the two rules I pre-created for this purpose in my policy #4(7 for dbedit) source and #5(8 for dbedit) and I will add more items to the source and destination parts. Adding more source objects. Modify fwpolicies ##Standard rule:8:dst:op 'not in' Summary What to say, dbedit is the only tool I currently see that at least in a limited way will allow us to automate a portion of the firewall policy, however due to the problematic insertion of new rules I am much more expecting a semi-automated solution where rule templates will exist, while automated script is only adding systems to the source/destination part of pre-existing template rules. We will see, at this point this was just a quick introduction to the dbedit as a summary of my quick LAB I did and maybe will be interesting for someone else. REFERENCES Checkpoint Gaia web admin documentation: Checkpoint R77 CLI command reference guide: If you enjoyed this blog, please share.