topic Re: TS-Agent CANNOT redistribute user-ip-port mappings in General Topics

TS-Agent CANNOT redistribute user-ip-port mappings

Gun-Slinger — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 13:37:27 GMT

I wanted to put this out in the forum to to save someone time and answer the question on the use case of TS-Agents participating in user-id redistribution. In a long trouble-shooting period and TAC engagement, it was confirmed that you cannot redistribute user-id mappings obtained from a Terminal Services (TS) agent.

We have submitted a FR for this capability but until that wins the FR voting battle we have to program the TS-agent on every cluster that is to use a user-id policy from the server.
Down side to this is we have an RDHS environment that will dynamically spin up another RDSH server and use the next available IP in the subnet range when it reaches a user cap (about 10 users per server). This has forced use to program a very large range of TS-agents on each cluster that users would connect through on user-id policies. Not ideal and limited to the hardware capacity.

Re: TS-Agent CANNOT redistribute user-ip-port mappings

Remo — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 07:26:10 GMT

Hi @Gun-Slinger

I am sorry to hear that you had such troubles with TAC - actually for something that could have been answered in about 10 seconds. Mainly because it is documented that redistribution of user-ip-port-mapping data from terminal services agents cannot be redistributed.

https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/pan-os/9-1/pan-os-admin/user-id/deploy-user-id-in-a-large-scale-network/redistribute-user-mappings-and-authentication-timestamps.html

Maybe for you an option is a script that runs on these servers when they boot so that they configure themselfes on the firewall - or that they write their own IP addresses/hostnames to a textfile somewhere and when there is a change in this textfile a script runs and updates the firewall configuration. This way the servers don't need direct access to your firewalls.

Re: TS-Agent CANNOT redistribute user-ip-port mappings

gshort — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 16:46:53 GMT

I wanted to update this thread with confirmation that this issue of TS-Agent being able to be redistributed has been implemented in PAN-OS 11.x
https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/pan-os/11-0/pan-os-release-notes/features-introduced-in-pan-os/cloud-identity-features

Re: TS-Agent CANNOT redistribute user-ip-port mappings

Gun-Slinger — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 16:54:35 GMT

Excellent news!... Now just to wait the year or so before the code is stabilized lol. Great find @gshort

Re: TS-Agent CANNOT redistribute user-ip-port mappings

Remo — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 18:38:52 GMT

@Gun-Slinger you're very optimistic with this year 😜

Any one already using PAN-OS 11 in production environment with quite a few features enabled without issues?