Welcome to lesson 5! Last time, we completed the installation and initialization of the management server and the gateway. So today, we'll dive a bit into their internals, specifically the Gaia operating system settings. The Gaia settings can be divided into two major categories:
- System Settings (IP addresses, Routing, NTP, DNS, DHCP, SNMP, backups, system updates, etc.). These parameters can be configured via WebUI or CLI;
- Security Settings (Everything related to Access Lists, IPS, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Anti-Bot, Application Control, etc. That is, all the security functionality). For this, SmartConsole or API is used.
In this lesson, we'll discuss the first point, i.e., System Settings.
As I mentioned, these settings can be edited either through the web interface or the command line. Let’s start with the web interface.
Gaia Portal
It's called the Gaia Portal in Check Point terminology. You can access it using a browser by connecting to the device's IP address via https. Supported browsers include Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE. Even Edge works, although it's not listed among officially supported browsers. The portal looks like this:
You can find a more detailed description of the portal, as well as interface and default route configuration in the video lesson below.
Now let’s look at the command line.
Check Point CLI
There is a common misconception that Check Point cannot be managed from the command line. This is not true. Almost all system settings can be changed in the CLI (In fact, security settings can also be modified using the Check Point API). There are several ways to access the CLI:
- Connect to the device via the console port.
- Connect via SSH (Putty, SecureCRT, etc.).
- Access the CLI from SmartConsole.
- Or from the web interface by clicking the ‘Open Terminal’ icon in the top panel.
The symbol > indicates that you are in the default Shell, which is called Clish. This is a restricted mode with a limited set of commands and settings available. To gain full access to all commands, you need to enter the Expert mode. This is comparable to Cisco's CLI, which has a user mode and privileged mode, requiring the enable command to enter. In Gaia, you enter expert mode by typing the expert command.
The CLI syntax is quite simple: Operation feature parameter
The four main operators you will use most often are: show, set, add, delete. Finding documentation for CLI commands is quite simple, just Google “”. There are also some sets of useful commands that you will definitely need in your daily work with Checkpoint. You don’t need to memorize them, as there are good reference guides for these commands, plus there are some quite handy cheat sheets. I will place a link to one of them under the video. I also recommend checking out our two articles:
We will cover working with Check Point CLI in the video lesson below.
Video lesson
Source: habr.com
