NxFilter Tutorial (How-To)

[cle...@symphony-systems.net]

Hi,

I have successfully managed to install Nxfilter, and even done the cluster and it is working OK. This is a very promising filter
that is so appealing and hopefully easy to work with. However I am now having challenges configuring it to work.

But this post is not about seeking assistance but for requesting if someone can do a Tutorial, yes, a tutorial, because this excellent work http://www.nxfilter.org/tutorial.html is more like Documentation that explains each feature of NxFilter. A tutorial would cover step by step
process of creating a working filter. The Chapter one "Getting Started" installation section started so well in a tutorial format, but after that
most users would be lost on where to proceed next.

Maybe I  should call what am requesting a "How-To", a Step by step tutorial of the initial basic configuration.
For instance, I am not using AD (which is well illustrated in the documentation). I am trying to do IP based authentication setup.
The info I would need to know is, which is the next step after successful installation ?  Is it policies ? or Users ? How do I block users ? etc.
I believe this information is present in the documentation, but is scattered all over, thus making it hard to join the necessary pieces together, hence consuming so many hours time trying to come up with a working solution. But if a How-to was available a newbie could setup and configure the filter
in minutes, rather than hours or days.

The current Documentation can be left as is, or can be deepened, to also serve as a reference/resource, but in addition to that, a separate,
simple but complete step-by-step configuration How-To can be added. I believe the NxFilter author is already busy making the it even better
and I would invite experienced users to contribute in this.

I would like to stress again that the current documentation is excellent, but we need a simple step by step A to Z config how-to, covering
a few setup scenarios to aid in quickly configuring this wonderful filter.

Regards,

Clemo
configure

[Jinhee]

Yeah, I myself thought about writing those kinds of documents like,

  1. When you deploy NxFilter into an office having 20 users without AD/LDAP.
  2. When you deploy NxFilter into an office having 1,000 users without AD/LDAP.
  3. When you deploy NxFilter into an office having 200 users with Active Directory.
  4. When you run NxFilter in an office having some mobile workers.

Not only these kinds of documents. Thinking of having many translated versions like
Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese. But I even couldn't cover my own language as
I don't have time for that. Simply beyond my limit.

At this point we can just wish that we have enough number of users and some of
them doing documentation for the others and we didn't get there yet. That's why
I always said that we need a bigger user base.

Jinhee

[Gabriel Cavaller]

Jinhee / Clemo

I would be up for this too.

I'm used to the commercial SaaS products such as (Websense/Webroot).

I've got a project where the company has 1000's of users, split over 20 sites.

Additionally, let's say 20% are mobile, in and out the office.

Looking at the above, it would be a combination of 3 and 4.

We have multiple sites, all using AD for this instance (local AD/DNS/GC servers) 

We then have many users, on laptops, which VPN in and or, work independently.

The alternative for us is to do the filtering per "firewall" through their appliances.

Would be great to best know, how to approach scenarios using the framework you have provided above.

Thanks very much

[Jinhee]

It depends on your situation and what you want. But normally people don't want to install 20 NxFilter. Though
it may be a better choice if you have 20 AD domains. If it's just one AD domain it's better be one NxFilter and
if you can use VPN for everybody they can have single sign-on.

If you don't need single sign-on and AD integration having central NxFilter and 20 users for each site would
be OK. Something like office account. Your mobile workers can be covered with NxClient.  And if there are
users need to use a different policy you can install NxClient on their PC as well.