How to protect your network with Napera's appliance Video

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How to protect your network with Napera's appliance

Hello and welcome to Web Informant.tv. I am David Strom, your host and reviewer. Today, we look at Napera’s network security appliance called the N24. It has a built-in switch along with PC, Health and Remediation features for the small and medium business that protects both Macs and Windows. Here, we are looking at the management page of the unit, showing you at a glance what is going on with your network over the last 24 hours or past month. If we click on the Health tab, you can see pieces that are running personal firewalls, whether they have AV enabled and are current on their signatures, and if they are current with their operating system patches. The product is relatively easy to setup. You connect it to your core network via port one and connect cables on other ports to either wireless access points or places that you want to protect such as public conference rooms. Once you are done, you power it on, you bring up a web browser on your local network and you will see it is management page showing you what is connected to the appliance. You can see whether each port has an active link and which ones are protected with the lock icon. When you first turn it on, it operates in a pass-through mode until you start to enable its protected features. Let us click on one of the ports and select the Edit button and then click on Yes for in forth Health and then save. You can do this through all the ports on the appliance or just the once that go to public places. You also need to identify where your DHCP servers, internet gateways and active directory servers are located. Go to Devices and you scroll down for each machine, you click on Edit over by the Options pane and check off the appropriate characteristics. You next setup your health policies in the configuration Health screen. You can click the various buttons to turn on these features such as checking for installed AV or working firewall. There is also the ability to authenticate users using one to three methods, Windows Active Directory 802.1x or through local user log-ins that you specify here on this page. And you can test your credentials to make sure the things are working properly too. Now, let us show you what happens when you try to attach an unhealthy PC that does not measure up to these policies. First, you see the results after we run in Napera NAP Enabler to turn on the NAP Agent. You can see that we are running a PC that does not have any AV installed, and it is behind on its updates as well. Once we connected this PC to the Napera appliance, we get this warning message about the health of the computer and indicate we need to update our AV software. Until we do our LAN accesses turned off so you cannot infect anyone else. We go ahead and install our AV software, in this case AVG because whether if something that Windows can do automatically such as OS updates, this requires manual intervention. If you have software that is not web accessible, you will need to put on DVD or USB key. Now, we go to the Devices tab, and you can see the details on our machine and we can see that it is healthy and has full access. What are some of the things I like? The setup was relatively straightforward, although not quite matching the screens and the documentation. I also like the – that you could start gradually and add more protection, as you understand the product and its features. I like that you did not need to install the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 or indeed, any server to make this work. Hence, it is relatively affordable for small networks too with the price of $3500.00. What are some of the things that I did not like? Any XP machine needs to be brought to Service Pack 3, which is probably a good idea for security reasons, but you will need that update to enable the Napera product protective features. In its web management interface, you will need to remember to save your configuration settings before you leave a page, otherwise, the changes are lost. You will also need to activate the Windows health agents, with either Internet Explorer ActiveX Control or via the gr

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Hello and welcome to Web Informant.tv. I am David Strom, your host and reviewer. Today, we look at Napera’s network security appliance called the N24. It has a built-in switch along with PC, Health and Remediation features for the small and medium business that protects both Macs and Windows.

Here, we are looking at the management page of the unit, showing you at a glance what is going on with your network over the last 24 hours or past month. If we click on the Health tab, you can see pieces that are running personal firewalls, whether they have AV enabled and are current on their signatures, and if they are current with their operating system patches.

The product is relatively easy to setup. You connect it to your core network via port one and connect cables on other ports to either wireless access points or places that you want to protect such as public conference rooms. Once you are done, you power it on, you bring up a web browser on your local network and you will see it is management page showing you what is connected to the appliance. You can see whether each port has an active link and which ones are protected with the lock icon.

When you first turn it on, it operates in a pass-through mode until you start to enable its protected features. Let us click on one of the ports and select the Edit button and then click on Yes for in forth Health and then save. You can do this through all the ports on the appliance or just the once that go to public places.

You also need to identify where your DHCP servers, internet gateways and active directory servers are located. Go to Devices and you scroll down for each machine, you click on Edit over by the Options pane and check off the appropriate characteristics.

You next setup your health policies in the configuration Health screen. You can click the various buttons to turn on these features such as checking for installed AV or working firewall. There is also the ability to authenticate users using one to three methods, Windows Active Directory 802.1x or through local user log-ins that you specify here on this page. And you can test your credentials to make sure the things are working properly too.

Now, let us show you what happens when you try to attach an unhealthy PC that does not measure up to these policies. First, you see the results after we run in Napera NAP Enabler to turn on the NAP Agent. You can see that we are running a PC that does not have any AV installed, and it is behind on its updates as well. Once we connected this PC to the Napera appliance, we get this warning message about the health of the computer and indicate we need to update our AV software. Until we do our LAN accesses turned off so you cannot infect anyone else. We go ahead and install our AV software, in this case AVG because whether if something that Windows can do automatically such as OS updates, this requires manual intervention. If you have software that is not web accessible, you will need to put on DVD or USB key.

Now, we go to the Devices tab, and you can see the details on our machine and we can see that it is healthy and has full access. What are some of the things I like? The setup was relatively straightforward, although not quite matching the screens and the documentation. I also like the – that you could start gradually and add more protection, as you understand the product and its features. I like that you did not need to install the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 or indeed, any server to make this work. Hence, it is relatively affordable for small networks too with the price of $3500.00.

What are some of the things that I did not like? Any XP machine needs to be brought to Service Pack 3, which is probably a good idea for security reasons, but you will need that update to enable the Napera product protective features. In its web management interface, you will need to remember to save your configuration settings before you leave a page, otherwise, the changes are lost. You will also need to activate the Windows health agents, with either Internet Explorer ActiveX Control or via the gr

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