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Managing EFW Devices Using the Policy Servers
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Audit and heartbeat and audit information is sent to the server from which the NIC
has last heard, which means that no audit or heartbeats are sent until a server
responds to a wake-up. These messages could be lost if the server is not available or
reachable due to network problems. A NIC does not retry these messages.
Therefore, if you have assigned backup Policy Servers for all of your primary Policy Servers,
as long as one Policy Server remains online, there is no interruption to normal EFW
operations.
If you take all of your Policy Servers offline, there is no impact to the ongoing policy
enforcement of the EFW devices in the domain, but heartbeat information and audit
records are lost for this time period. Machines that are rebooted implement their fallback
mode until a server comes back online.
Configuring Policy Servers for Redundancy
Policy Servers can be configured redundantly for high availability. Currently, up to three
redundant Policy Servers can be deployed in a single EFW domain. A Policy Server can
specify a second Policy Server to serve as a backup Policy Server if the primary server is
unavailable. If desired, a third Policy Server can also be specified in case neither the
primary nor backup servers are available.
Most system data is replicated across all Policy Servers in an EFW domain. This replication
happens regardless of whether any Policy Servers have assigned backup Policy Servers.
You may, therefore, connect via the Management Console to any Policy Server and perform
configuration and policy actions on any EFW device in the domain, regardless of its primary
or backup Policy Server assignments. Either the primary Policy Server or a backup server for
that Policy Server distributes the new policy to the device, but you do not need to be
connected to one of these Policy Servers to request the distribution of this change.
Heartbeat information is replicated periodically, rather than immediately. The most up-to-
date information about an EFW device can be found by connecting the Management
Console to its primary Policy Server, rather than to another Policy Server in the EFW
domain. However, because the time period for replication is relatively short, this periodic
replication will not be an issue in most operational circumstances.
Although audit records are not replicated across Policy Servers, audit query results
automatically include records found on other servers (if requested), regardless of the Policy
Server to which you are connected when executing the query.
NOTE:
For troubleshooting purposes, the list of IP addresses that a secured
computer attempts to contact can be found on that computer in a file called
embdfw.ini
in the System or System32 folder.
NOTE:
The EFW system allows one minute for the primary Policy Server to reply to a NIC
boot-up before the secured computer attempts to contact any backup Policy Servers.
