Installing FwPlatinum


Files and Directory Structure

FwPlatinum comes as a Tar Gzipped file, once you unpacked it, (which you must have already done when reading this file) it creates the following directory structure: The client scripts to be run on the Webserver are: The server scripts to be run on the Firewall Management Station are: None of these need to run as root, so I recommend that they don't.

Installation Procedure

FwPlatinum can run on a single Fw-1 Management Station/Web server machine. Or, you can have the fwplatd daemon running on the Fw-1 Management Station, and have fwplat.cron and the fwplat CGI script running on your webserver.

Repeat the process below for each machine involved, and ensure that the configuration files are identical on each machine.

You are now ready to start the server daemon and to define the cronjob client's task.

Give the server 10 minutes to get some initial data, and you can then see some results by going to
http://WebServer/cgi-bin/fwplat

Multiple Firewall Management Stations

I need to run multiple instances of Fwplat (I have multiple management stations), but I only use one stats/web server to get and display the statistics for all the instances. This means I need to use different configuration filesnames for each fwplat instance. Here's how you set up diffent configuration file names:

Using Offline Firewall Logs

If you can't run the server scripts on the firewall management station for whatever reason, you can run them on another machine if it can be sent chunks of the logs every 5 minutes.

First, set up a job to send the logs from the management station to the fwplat server. This could be done in various ways. Eg, using SSH:

#!/bin/ksh
while [ 1 ]; do
  fw log -ftn > /tmp/fw.log&
  sleep 300
  kill %+
  scp -bQC -i IDFile /tmp/fw.log fwplat@fwplat-server:$SERVERTMPDIR/fw.log
done

Next, on the Fwplat server, run the following:

touch $SERVERTMPDIR/fwplat-tabd.txt
fwplatpath/bin/fwplat-logtaild [-c ConfigFile] -f $SERVERTMPDIR/fw.log
fwplatpath/bin/fwplat-serverd [-c ConfigFile]
Note that we cannot run fwplat-tabd, so we will not be able to graph TABLE type entries and need to fake a fwplat-tabd.txt file.
Steve Campbell <steve@computurn.com>, 10 Oct 2001