Configuring URL filtering from command line

[DavePalo]

Hi all,

Just wondered if anybody knew of a quick way to apply the same action to all categories within an URL filter please?

It's not the end of the world if it can't be done, it just seems to me that a wildcard option would be useful.

For example, if I wanted to create a URL filtering profile called "minimal" which just allows 3 categories, I would like to be able to do something like this:

set profiles url-filtering minimal block *

set profiles url-filtering minimal alert [ business-and-economy computer-and-internet-info computer-and-internet-security ]

At the moment it seems that every category defaults to "allow" unless you specifically configure each category otherwise.

Again, not the end of the world if it can't be done - just might save me a bit of time!

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave

[DavePalo]

Sorry, forgot to say I'm running 4.0.3 on a PA-500

Thanks,
Dave

[jcostello]

Dave

At this point it does not appear that there is a wild card feature on the command line for the url profile. Though that would be nice to have in the policy section. The following command line will configure all of the other categories to block by default:

set profiles url-filtering minimal block [ abortion alcohol-and-tobacco auctions content-delivery-networks cult-and-occult dead-sites dynamically-generated-content educational-institutions entertainment-and-arts financial-services games government health-and-medicine image-and-video-search individual-stock-advice-and-tools internet-communications internet-portals job-search keyloggers-and-monitoring legal local-information military motor-vehicles news-and-media not-resolved online-greeting-cards online-music online-personal-storage open-http-proxies parked-domains personal-sites-and-blogs philosophy-and-political-advocacy phishing-and-other-frauds private-ip-addresses proxy-avoidance-and-anonymizers real-estate recreation-and-hobbies reference-and-research religion search-engines sex-education shareware-and-freeware shopping social-networking society spam-urls sports streaming-media training-and-tools translation travel unconfirmed-spam-sources unknown web-advertisements web-based-email web-hosting ]

It would be nice to have a default action option at the command line when configuring actions with multiple options like this.

Hope that helps.

James

[DavePalo]

Hi James,

Thanks for your message.

I have been configuring each category action explicitly in policies in a similar manner to your example and this works ok.  I was just surprised that there wasn't a neater way.

I'm not sure how often new categories come along.  If I only want to ever allow categories x y and z and block everything else then I guess I just need to make sure my list is always up to date, otherwise any new categories would be allowed.

Please could we could add category wildcards to the features request list Palo Alto?

Many thanks
Dave

[dyang]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your feedback!  Generally speaking, new categories are rarely added (though they can be, if genuinely necessary), so hopefully this is a one-time setup issue for you (unless you need to change your URL filtering profile).

That said, you are always welcome to contact your sales rep to have feature requests submitted.

Thanks,

Doris