I had a hard time figuring out how to configure OSPFv3 authentication on a Palo Alto Networks NGFW due to its different configuration formats compared to a Cisco router.
TL;DR: The SPI must be set in hexadecimal, while the actual key (40 chars, hexadecimal) must be grouped in 5 sections, separated with hyphens.
Continue reading OSPFv3 Authentication on a Palo Alto (Logical Router)
The other day, I was troubleshooting an issue where users reported that “some websites are working while some are not“. Uh. This is almost the worst scenario to face from a networker’s perspective. It’s way easier if things do or don’t work at all, but not this “some don’t” situation.
The scenario: Using Zscaler for outbound Internet connections, connected via a GRE tunnel from a Palo Alto Networks firewall. TL;DR: If it’s not DNS, it’s MTU. 😂 The “Suppress ICMP Frag Needed” option within the ICMP Drop section of the Zone Protection Profile did what it is meant to do: block “ICMP fragmentation needed” messages. Unfortunately, this killed *some* sessions which had the “Don’t fragment” bit set but exceeded the (lower) MTU of the GRE tunnel.
Continue reading It was MTU! Zscaler over GRE behind Palo, blocking ICMP Frag Needed
I just ran into a partially working Palo Alto firewall — a PA-1410 shipped with PAN-OS 11.0.3-h10 and ZTP (Zero-Touch Provisioning) enabled — as I exited ZTP mode to configure the firewall in standalone mode. However, this config shortcut did not work as expected. :(
For a few weeks, our PlayStation stopped downloading game updates. I figured it was just a temporary issue with the PS4. Since it didn’t affect me directly but only the kids, I didn’t pay much attention at first. I planned to wait for a firmware update from Sony. When such an update eventually came but didn’t solve the issue, I started getting suspicious – especially when I found almost no relevant results online for the official error code, which reads “(HTTP Status Code : 416) (CE-40862-0)”.
After conducting further detailed searches, I finally came across a post in the Palo Alto Networks LIVEcommunity. That definitely caught my attention. If there’s one thing that sets my home network apart from most “normal” households, it’s the fact that I have a Palo Alto firewall running – not your average consumer-grade router. 😂
Continue reading Palo vs. PlayStation: How a Security Feature Blocked Our PlayStation Updates
This goes out to anyone who uses more than one Site-to-Site VPN tunnel between two locations that are secured by firewalls from Palo Alto Networks. Using two (or even more) VPN tunnels, you need an automatic way to failover the traffic flow from one VPN to the other in case of failures. Here’s how to accomplish that requirement:
There are recurring cases where tasks cannot be edited quickly and easily using the classic Palo Alto Networks GUI or Panorama. For example, editing multiple policies at once, such as during a zone migration. Or checking which policies haven’t log forwarding enabled, hence enabling it directly. Or finding unused objects, including deleting them.
For these situations (and many more!), there’s a tool with a wealth of predefined scripts: pan-os-php. This first blog post covers installation and some initial use cases.
Continue reading Editing Palo Configs by Scripts: pan-os-php
Palo Alto Networks, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, has announced a significant strategic shift. The company will transition from its core cybersecurity business to exclusively focus on apparel manufacturing.
Continue reading Palo Alto Networks Announces Strategic Shift to Apparel Manufacturing
We wanted to monitor some of our Palo firewalls from our monitoring system via the API. But: Which enhanced metrics/KPIs shall we monitor? While there are some obvious ones such as interface counters, uptime, software versions, license expiry dates, or HA-states, we dug a little deeper to get more out of it, such as mgmt-/data-plane stats, packet rates, drop counters (all global counters?), and routing entries.
Here are some ideas on which values a monitoring system could observe. I’m listing the required API calls along with some demo values that can be used to develop monitoring tools/scripts.
Continue reading Which KPIs to monitor on a Palo Alto Firewall?
If you want to establish an Internet connection (that is: IPv6 and IPv4) right away from your firewall through xDSL connections, you need quite some technologies: PPPoE and PPPoEv6 (PPP IPV6CP) along with DHCPv6-PD. Fortunately, with PAN-OS 11.0 and 11.1, those missing IPv6 links were finally added by PANW to their Strata firewalls. (I have been awaiting them since 2015!)
So, here it is: Connecting a Palo through an xDSL modem to a residential ISP:
You can talk to firewalls and Panorama from Palo Alto Networks in various ways. The well-known GUI (which I really love, by the way) and the CLI are quite common at first glance. Nearly everyone using the Palos is familiar with these configuration options.
When it comes to automation at some point, either to configure those devices or just to read out some KPIs for your monitoring, APIs are in place. Plural because Palo has two APIs: The so-called “XML API” and the “REST API“. Let’s get started with both of them:
Continue reading Getting started with the APIs from Palo Alto Ntwks
How to route traffic between multiple logical routers aka Inter-LR Routing on a Palo Alto Networks Strata firewall? More precisely, inclusive route redistribution rather than a few static routes. –> Via iBGP through loopback interfaces. ✅ Let’s go:
Continue reading PANW: Dynamic Routing between Logical Routers
With PAN-OS 10.2, Palo Alto Networks has introduced the “Advanced Routing Engine” (ARE) with its “Logical Routers” (LR) rather than the legacy “Virtual Routers” (VR).
The neat thing, as always: You can configure everything through the GUI. Here’s a basic example of how I’m using a prefix list to filter incoming BGP routes:
Continue reading BGP Route Filtering with Palo’s Advanced Routing Engine (ARE)
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:
Continue reading Misusing Palo’s Captive Portal as a Guest Wi-Fi Welcome Page
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!
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?
Continue reading Palo’s Mgmt-Intf is not usable with IPv6 anymore