Misusing Palo’s Captive Portal as a Guest Wi-Fi Welcome Page

Authentication, Internet Access, Palo Alto Networks, WLAN/Wi-Fi, , ,

I was faced with an interesting customer requirement: An existing guest Wi-Fi should be prefaced with a welcome page for accepting the terms and conditions. Since there was already a Palo Alto Networks firewall in place, could we perhaps use its captive portal directly for this purpose? It’s not about authenticating the users, but only for a single webpage with a simple check button that should appear once a month per device.

TL;DR: While we were able to redirect every device to a welcome page, we were not able to extend the lifetime of those sessions to longer than 24 hours. This might fit for short-term guest Wi-Fis, but is not appropriate for long-term connections aka BYOD. However, this is how we have done it:

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Dynamic DNS on a Palo

DNS/DNSSEC, Internet Access, Palo Alto Networks, , , ,

With PAN-OS 9.0 (quite some time ago), Palo Alto Networks has added Dynamic DNS for a firewall’s interfaces. That is: If your Internet-facing WAN interface gets a dynamic IP address via DHCP or PPPoE (rather than statically configured), the firewall updates this IP address to a configured hostname. The well-known DynDNS providers such as Dyn (formerly DynDNS), No-IP, or FreeDNS Afraid are supported. Since the Palo supports DHCP, PPPoE (even on tagged subinterfaces) as well as DHCPv6 respectively PPPoEv6, we can now operate this type of firewall on residential ISP connections AND still access it via DNS hostnames. Great. Let’s have a look at the configuration steps.

Spoiler: The DynDNS feature on a Palo only supports static IPv6 addresses rather than dynamic ones. 🤦🤦🤦 Yes, you haven’t misread. The DYNAMIC DNS feature does not support DYNAMIC IP addresses, but only STATIC ones. D’oh!

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Akustikdämmung im Büro

DIY/Bastelarbeiten, Off-Topic, , , , ,

Als Consultant im Homeoffice mache ich vor allem eins: Telefonieren und an Videokonferenzen teilnehmen, neudeutsch: Calls. Und es nervt mich total, wenn mein Gegenüber einen schlechten Ton hat. Also akutisch. Das verbaute Mikrofon im Notebook oder irgendwelche Raummikros gehen gar nicht. Gleichermaßen möchte ich selber auch nicht viele Stunden am Tag ein Headset aufhaben.

Was hilft: Ein Podcast-Mikrofon und eine gute Raumakustik, sprich: wenig Hall. Um letzteres habe ich mich die letzten Wochen gekümmert. Hier mein Erfahrungsbericht, Tonaufnahmen und Messergebnisse.

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Palo’s Mgmt-Intf is not usable with IPv6 anymore

IPv6, Palo Alto Networks, , ,

Wow, that was unexpected: With PAN-OS 11.1 the out-of-band management interface of Palo Alto Networks firewalls doesn’t accept an IPv6 default route pointing to one of its own data interfaces anymore. That is: In most setups, you can’t use IPv6 for management purposes anymore. “Works as expected.” Wow. Really?

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How to install Palo Alto’s PAN-OS on a FortiGate

Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Tutorial/Howto, , , ,

It happens occasionally that a customer has to choose between a Palo and a Forti. While I would always favour the Palo for good reasons, I can understand that the Forti is chosen for cost savings, for example.

Fortunately, there is a hidden way of installing PAN-OS, the operating system from Palo Alto Networks, on FortiGate hardware firewalls. Here’s how you can do it:

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Optimized NAT46 Config on a FortiGate

Fortinet, Internet Access, IPv6, NAT, Tutorial/Howto, , , , ,

Johannes published a basic NAT46 configuration for a Fortigate firewall with FortiOS 7.0 some time ago. I run such a service (legacy IPv4 access to IPv6-only resources) since FortiOS 5.6, which means more than six years; lastly with FortiOS 6.4. It’s running for more than 100 servers without any other problems as we see them with IPv4 only or dual stack services.

But we weren’t happy with the basic configuration example by Fortinet. We wanted some NAT46 sample configuration with more details, that is: including the original source IPv4 address within the synthesized/SNATted IPv6 address. More in this post, after a short story about my way to a running nat46 configuration with port forwarding in FortiOS 7.2.x.

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DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation on Palo Alto’s NGFW

DHCP/DHCPv6, IPv6, Palo Alto Networks, , , , ,

Finally! With PAN-OS 11.0 a long missing IPv6 feature was introduced: DHCPv6-PD aka prefix delegation. For the first time, we can now operate a PAN-OS firewall directly on the Internet (the IPv6-Internet that is) on many kinds of ISP connections. Remember: To get a routed IPv6 prefix requires DHCPv6-PD (if you’re not a BGP-homed enterprise). Hence, without that feature, we could not connect to the Internet with a Palo directly.

With DHCPv6-PD, the firewall can receive a prefix from the ISP (commonly a /48 or a /56), while handing out /64s to downstream layer 3 interfaces. Here we go:

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DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation

DHCP/DHCPv6, IPv6, , , , , , ,

What is DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation? Coming from IPv4, you’re already familiar with DHCP (for IPv4) which hands out IPv4 addresses to clients. The same applies to (stateful) DHCPv6: it hands out IPv6 addresses to clients.

However, with IPv6 we’re heavily dealing with subnets rather than just single addresses. Again, you’re familiar with IPv4: For an IPv4-based ISP connection, you’re getting either a single public IPv4 address or a small subnet such as a /29, /28, or the like for your WAN interface. For an IPv6-based ISP connection, you’re getting a subnet which includes multiple unique subnets to be used for other layer 3 segments rather than a single address (with NAT on the CPE). This is where DHCPv6 prefix delegation (commonly abbreviated as DHCPv6-PD) kicks in: It hands out IPv6 subnets to routers.

Let’s have a closer look:

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More Capture Details III

Network, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Another update of the Ultimate PCAP is available. Again, there are some special new packets in there which I want to point out here. Feel free to download the newest version to examine those new protocols and packets by yourself. Featuring: SNMPv3, WoL, IPMI, HSRP, Zabbix, Pile of Poo, and Packet Comments. ✅

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Contributing to Wireshark (without any coding skills!)

Wireshark, , , ,

For many years I was afraid to open new issues for open-source tools since I am not a coder at all and won’t ever be able to fix some of the problems. Many times I got answers like “The source is open, go ahead and fix it yourself”. This brought me to a point where I simply stopped proposing new ideas and features.

This has changed since I was at SharkFest’22 EUROPE (the Wireshark Developer and User Conference), especially at a session from Uli Heilmeier called “Contribute to Wireshark – the low hanging fruits” [PDF].

TL;DR: You don’t need to be a programmer to contribute to Wireshark! E.g., submit new feature requests, report bugs or write at the wiki.

And that is exactly what I would like to recommend to you. This post is about giving examples, that even minor errors and thoughts are appreciated by the Wireshark team. But, of course, if you actually have coding skills, please go ahead and fix some of the issues. ;)

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Basic NTP Client Test on Windows: w32tm

Monitoring, NTP, Windows, , , ,

When implementing NTP servers, it’s always an interesting part to check whether the server is “up and running” and reachable from the clients. While I’ve done many basic NTP checks out of Linux, I lacked a small docu to do this with Windows. It turned out that there’s no need for third-party software because Windows already includes a tool to test NTP connections: w32tm.

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Minor Palo Bug: ICMPv6 Errors sourced from Unspecified Address

IPv6, Palo Alto Networks, , , , ,

During my IPv6 classes, I discovered a (minor) bug at the NGFW from Palo Alto Networks: ICMPv6 error messages, such as “time exceeded” (type 3) as a reply of traceroute, or “destination unreachable” (type 1) as a reply of a drop policy, are not correctly sourced from the IPv6 address of the data interface itself, but from the unspecified address “::”. Here are some details:

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Verbindungsaufbau Deutsche Glasfaser

DHCP/DHCPv6, Internet Access, IPv6, , , , , , , , ,

Als netzwerktechnisches Spielkind beschäftige ich mich nicht nur mit den Netzwerken großer Firmenumgebungen, sondern auch mit meinem eigenen Anschluss daheim. Vor vielen Jahren habe ich dem echten Dual-Stack Anschluss der Deutschen Telekom mal auf die Finger geguckt – heute ist die Variante der Deutschen Glasfaser an der Reihe, welches zwar ein Dual Stack, aber ohne eigene öffentliche IPv4 Adresse ist. Quasi ein halbes DS-Lite. Kernfrage für mich war: Kann ich die Fritzbox (mit ihren mitgelieferten Presets für verschiedene ISPs) durch eine echte Enterprise-Firewall ersetzen, die ja leider nicht unbedingt alle Sprecharten wie PPPoE im Subinterface oder PPP IPv6CP unterstützen.

TL;DR: DHCP, DHCPv6-PD, RA.

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