Case Study: Deploying and Configuring a Netscreen 100 Firewall Appliance to Secure the Network

Firewall implementation and deployments are done many times without much consideration or planning. Upper management in many organizations do not know what their firewall policies are, the type of firewall it is, or the configuration of the firewall. Often companies believe that firewalls are the magical silver bullet for their organization. It takes a lot to configure a firewall properly and to maintain it securely. After being hired to take over Network Security responsibilities for my organization, I quickly realized that the deployment of our firewall architecture was flawed and the network was exposed due to the inadequate patch management of the NT operating system and the Checkpoint FW-1 application. After some analysis of the firewall architectures, senior management supported the decision to re-deploy a new firewall, architecture, and policies. The purpose of this document is to show the reader on how I deployed the Netscreen 100 firewall security appliance. It will also assist the reader in deploying and configuring a Netscreen 100 firewall via the command line (CLI) and the graphical user interface (GUI) and the reason why you should configure it using those options. The paper will focus on the firmware version 4.0 or higher.