Essential Check Point FireWall-1 NG: An Installation, Configuration, and Troubleshooting Guide

There are open-source firewalls, and there are commercial firewalls that are easier to configure. No software firewall, however, has the reputation for impermeability that Check Point FireWall-1 NG has. Essential Check Point FireWall-1 NG exists to serve the network administrator as a manual and ready reference for the defensive utility. It's a sensitive role, because a poorly administered firewall can be worse than no firewall at all. Dameon Welch-Abernathy provides his readers with the knowledge they need--in the form of both instructions and raw information--to install, set up, and administer FireWall-1 NG properly in a variety of configurations.

A word of warning: This book provides detailed installation instructions for Microsoft Windows 2000 only. Though other supported operating systems get some coverage, only for Windows does the author walk you through the complete set of installation screens. This may or may not be a problem for you. With installation out of the way, the book treats configuration in an approximately platform-neutral fashion (though all screen shots are from Windows 2000). Typically, Welch-Abernathy opens a section with some theoretical information (about authentication, say, or firewalling in VPNs), then provides a relevant stepped procedure for a typical scenario, then goes through a very useful series of questions and answers (which are indexed separately--a helpful feature). It's a good approach that helps guarantee the reader gets the required information. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to knowledgeably and effectively support Check Point FireWall-1 NG. In addition to basic firewall functionality and rule-setting, the author covers Virtual Private Network (VPN) setups, alternative forms of user authentication, Network Address Translation (NAT), and reliability issues. Special chapters cover the INSPECT and SecuRemote/SecureClient utilities.