

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. Checkpoint LAB topology, using R77.20 release installed inside VirtualBox VM host Checkpoint Components used
#Download checkpoint smartdashboard r77 install#
Topology of our LAB and LAB componentsįor this lab I was using GNS3 and VirtualBox 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. 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. 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.Īnd 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. 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.

EXERCISE C – creating a few new network objects.EXERCISE B – disabling a simple rule from the policy.Configure basic NAT rule to hide internal network behind external interface IP Setup initial routing, initial sample ruleset and simple NAT Basic CLI configuration of Checkpoint FW interfaces Unpack & Install R77.20 into VirtualBox VM
