topic Re: User-ID Management Setting in General Topics

User-ID Management Setting

djr — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:43:48 GMT

In the device management settings there is now a "User-ID" checkbox. I have looked at the administrators guide but it doesn't mention it, presumably because it is fairly new.

What does this actually control, because the user-id agent on the box works fine without that checked (or seems to). Other options such as SSH, ping etc are obviously management access protocols but user-id doesn't seem to fit in quite the same.

Re: User-ID Management Setting

Retired Member — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:38:25 GMT

That option is needed to allow communication between firewalls when a firewall is acting as a redistribution point to provide user mapping information to other PAN-OS firewalls.Also it is available for management profile.You can distribute user id information as a new feature on panos 5

Re: User-ID Management Setting

zarina — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:42:51 GMT

The userid option is introduced in 5.0 and need to be enabled when you are using the agentless user id and also when distributing the mappings to other firewalls

Re: User-ID Management Setting

djr — Fri, 24 May 2013 08:05:15 GMT

Sorry to be obtuse, but I still don't get this.

I had agentless user-id turned on and working with my 5 DCs without this turned on, so it doesn't *appear* to prevent that working.

If it controls redistribution of the user-id information I can see why I wouldn't have noticed that, but does that then mean that I need the management addresses of the to firewalls to be included in the "permitted addresses" as well?

Thanks

Re: User-ID Management Setting

gwesson — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:33:47 GMT

The checkbox allows that specific firewall to be the agent for other firewalls. It gives you a central user-ID agent that several firewalls can use without having to deploy software agents or set up the agentless configuration on every firewall.

Hope this helps,

Greg

Re: User-ID Management Setting

djr — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:45:15 GMT

Not really, two specific questions then:

1) Is it needed to permit an XML API connection from an external server

2) Is it needed to replicate user ID data to the HA peer?

2a) If the answer to 2 is "yes", then does the peer firewall need to be in the permitted IPs list?