Lessons learnt from COVID-19

I think this will be one of the major health disaster of the 21th century. It has shows that in our hyperconnected world, it would not be difficult to spread a virus.

No need of a some people (activist or terrorits) to spread it, as shown in the movie "12 Monkeys".

We just need a virus with a long incubation time to allow people with no symptoms to travel before being sick...

Anyway, let's get back to the topic of this post, the lessons learnt from this period.

1 - Appreciate simple things

Being confined at home gives you time to appreciate things you would not noticed in the "pre-COVID" lifestyle.

2 - Keep contacts with relatives, friends, colleagues.

Also, it was not possible to physically meet, you can message/call or do a visio to discuss. It is different, but it is better than being totally in lockdown.

3 - Do not keep in the same location, positive cases and negative cases

Unless you want the positive cases to contamine the negative ones. It is like having zombies in a building with non contaminated people ...if you watched World War Z, you have a lot of times this situation, like that one

Or for IT people, it is like leaving a compromised machine with a worm in the production network waiting all the machines get infected.

4 - Believe in a cure.
Eventually, scientists will find a cure.

Multiple vaccins are going to be released.

Get a GlobalProtect with a trusted SSL certificate for free

During the COVID-19 time, most of the workers have to work remotely (when they can). 

GlobalProtect is the name of the remote users VPN solution included in PAN-OS. It tooks less than 20 min to set up a basic VPN to allow users to work from home. 

I am just going to show how to set up a deployment with a free domain name and a legitimate SSL certificate.

1 - the domain name

Register a .tk domain on freenom.com
It is free, you only need to renew the registration every year.

Once you  have your domain, you can create an A record to point to your firewall's public IP address.

2- the SSL certificate

To get a free certificate trusted by most systems, we will take advantage of the letsencrypt project.

You need to run certbot in manual mode on a machine with Internet access.
You will use the DNS challenge, once you have the challenge, create the record on freenom accordingly.

Once it is done, you will get the certificate on the machine.

You will need to upload the private key and the associated certificate to the firewall and configure the GlobalProtect to use this certificate.

Zoom sur ... EnergyWise

Je profite de ce post pour parler d'EnergyWise.