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April 11, 2006
FWDB now supports firewall logs stored in a remote SQL Server database
In the next release of the Firewall Dashboard, there will be a new parsing plugin that may help some of you out there, especially if you work in an environment where you may manage multiple firewalls.
The FWDB now supports the ability to read firewall logs stored in a remote SQL database, if they follow the ISA SQL server table schema. For most people using ISA 2004, that means you can run the fwsrv.sql script on any SQL server in your network and point ISA to log there. If you tell FWDB about it, it will happily extract the firewall events from that source without skipping a beat!
It also means that if you have a firewall NOT compliant with an existing parser, there is a good chance you can write a simple shim to force your logs to a SQL data source and be done with it. The remote SQL server plugin even has the ability to parse out the records by firewall server name, which means you can now have one SQL data source to store ALL firewall events from different servers.
Many thanks to Bob Palnik from Metfab Technologies for coming to me with this deployment scenario, and being gracious while we tested it in his office. This is a useful deployment scenario for SBS admins who wish to reduce their MSDE instances and who will instead store their ISA logs in the already installed SQL server.
Posted by Dana Epp at April 11, 2006 05:08 PM
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