I want to allow access to Twitter, but block all other social-networking services. The obvious approach is to allow the Twitter application and then have a rule blocking the social-networking category for web-browsing and ssl, but this doesn't work, Twitter gets blocked also. In order to allow Twitter to work I have to add twitter.com and *.twitter.com to a custom category and allow this as well. Surely this defeats the point of having web based applications defined seperately, I have the same problem trying to allow Google Docs but block other file sharing apps - I have to add docs.google.com to a custom category. If I go to www.twitter.com in a browser, should the firewall not recognise this as "application: twitter"? Or am I configuring it wrong? Whitelisting URLs (particularly for backend API and content server urls) in order to get applications to work is not scalable and runs contrary to Palo-Alto's claims to be application-aware. Liam.
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