General Information on Network Objects

The Network Objects function allows you to maintain information about network addressable components on your network. This function acts as a central repository for use by other functions in the Firewall. Primarily, network objects are used to designate source and destination addresses when you create your connections. Individual network objects can be placed into groups. Use of these groups can save time when configuring connections. Key elements that should be defined as network objects include:

The figure below illustrates how network objects can become part of a connection configuration.

Tip for Configuring Network Objects

Wherever possible, it is a good idea to encompass contiguous network addresses into a single network object, rather than creating a network group. This will help to improve the performance of the connection rule processing. For example, if you have a set of contiguous addresses such as the following:
ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT
 
   George 191.1.10.1
   Susan  191.1.10.3
   Helen  191.1.10.5
   Peter  191.1.10.7
   John   191.1.10.9
You could represent all of these addresses with a single network object (IP address = 191.1.10.0, subnet mask = 255.255.255.0). For purposes of improving the performance of rule processing, this would be much more efficient than if each of these addresses had been placed into one network group.

Further Information

Network Objects

Group Name

Enter the group name. The group name should NOT contain a pipe symbol(|), a single quote (or apostrophe) character('), or a double quote(") character as these are used as SMIT and file delimiters. Use of these characters will result in unreliable data.

Description

This field is optional and is provided in case you want to provide a comment or additional information about this item.

Objects in Group

Click Select to choose all the network objects that you wish to form for this group. Click Remove to remove objects from the group.

Select

Press the "Select..." button to access a list of defined objects that are valid for this function.

Remove

Press the "Remove" button to eliminate a selected item from this list. This action will only remove the item from this list. This action will have no effect on other places where this item is defined.

OK

Press the "OK" button to save changes and close the window.

Cancel

Press the "Cancel" button to close the window without saving any changes.