PanOS – Palo Alto basic commands after web console lockout

Since I’m still a big fan of the Palo Alto firewall family, there are some things, which really feel strangely disturbing. Nothing functional, otherwise I won”t be as convinced but in terms of administration. The most advanced network security device is better managed by webinterface – something every network guru feels goosebumps in his neck.

The worse it is, if the webinterface hangs and you need to use the unfamiliar command line interface. Whereas many vendors simply follow SNMP logic and somehow end up with something similar to the industry standard context setup, PanOs CLI feels strangely different.

Here are your survival commands to make login on the web interface work again:

  1. Have you rebooted the System?
    request restart system
  2. Did you restart the management service?
    debug software restart process management-server
  3. Did you check the file system and free space?
    show system disk-space
  4. In case you need to delete crash dumps or free space anyway:
    delete debug-log mp-log file *
  5. And finally if the system still does not respond due to hanging commits:
    commit force

This list is far from being complete, but after experiencing one software version which filled up the root file system after failed content updates and locking out the admins from the web interface, combinations of these commands helped to make the firewall accessible again.

To be fair, this was a one time error in three years running twelve of these boxes, nevertheless it felt quite uncomfortable.

Kyp. F.

HowTo activate SNMP on vSphere 6.0 hosts

Monitoring ESXi with an standard open source monitoring tool usually requires SNMP. Searching for SNMP in the vCenter configuration context this simply allows you to start the service – but not exactly leads to success in the first place. Probably you get an error.

You check in the security profiles and find the service stopped although it is configured to start with the host. Manual start delivers an “ooops”.

Looking for an clickable configuration context did not lead to an solution I was aware of. Continue reading

Emergency Update PaloAlto Procedures

Nach dem letzten Firmware Update war meine Test PA 200 nicht mehr per Weboberfläche zu erreichen. Da schon kurz danach ein weiteres Update folgte, habe ich nicht an den offensichtlichen Fehler – und mal einen anderen Browser als Chrome zu verwenden – gedacht und mich um ein Firmware Update via SSH bemüht.

Das geht tatsächlich gut und einfach und man kommt hier zügig zu einem Ergebnis – jedenfalls wenn dann die Browserkompatibilität gegeben ist.

Dabei folgt man den selben Schritten wie auf der Weboberfläche:

Zunächst die Kontrolle der aktuell auf dem System befindlichen Softwarestände und danach gegebenenfalls die Aktualisierung aus dem Online Repository.

request system software info

requestsystemsoftwarecheck

Danach erfolgt dann der Abgleich mit den Repositories von Palo Alto Continue reading