Sync your firewall configurations with Playbook

Matasano Chargen released Playbook 2.0, which makes it easier to manage your network’s firewall rules. It syncs your firewall configurations with a central web-based console and gives you change control, intelligent search, and internal documentation at the push of a button.

This release adds support for managing NetScreen firewalls running ScreenOS, and completes support for the Cisco family of firewalls with the addition of PIX, ASA, and the IOS ACL language.

Playbook 2.0 sports syntax checkers for each of the supported firewall languages. Every time you look at a rule, or you preview a change to a ruleset, any identified syntax errors will be highlighted. The errors sidebar provides links to each of these errors to let you review them right away.

One great thing about having everything on version control is that you can query your repository to get a better understanding of what your change activity looks like. Playbook already had a Timeline view where you can review recent changes and drill down by type of change, firewall, user and time period. This new release augments this capability with graphical charts, that plot change activity based on context. The dashboard shows a new Activity chart with all events in the last year, month, or 24 hours. Each firewall page includes its own activity chart.

In addition to the built-in authentication support v2.0 integrates with your Active Directory or RADIUS servers for authentication. If you already use these for auth Playbook can talk to them so you don’t have to worry about dealing with user provisioning for yet another app.

Playbook uses wikis extensively to let you document firewalls, networks, protocols and anything else pertaining to your firewall infrastructure. With v2.0, Playbook lets you tag any web page with user-defined tags that are searchable. Tags let you find all protocol pages that describe a mailing protocol or all firewalls with the same Point of Contact.