Manual configuration

If you want to bind a profile to a bind point other than Global, you must manually configure the binding. Also, certain security checks require that you either manually enter the necessary exceptions or enable the learning feature to generate the exceptions that your Web sites and Web services need. Some of these tasks cannot be performed by using the App Firewall wizard.

If you are familiar with how the App Firewall works and prefer manual configuration, you can manually configure a signatures object and a profile, associate the signatures object with the profile, create a policy with a rule that matches the web traffic that you want to configure, and associate the policy with the profile. You then bind the policy to Global, or to a bind point, to put it into effect, and you have created a complete security configuration.

For manual configuration, you can use the GUI (a graphical interface) or the command line. Citrix recommends that you use the GUI. Not all configuration tasks can be performed at the command line. Certain tasks, such as enabling signatures and reviewing learned data, must be done in the GUI. Most other tasks are easier to perform in the GUI.

Replicating configuration

When you use the GUI (GUI) or the command line interface (CLI) to manually configure the App Firewall, the configuration is saved in the /nsconfig/ns.conf file. You can use the commands in that file to replicate the configuration on another appliance. You can cut and paste the commands into the CLI one by one, or you can save multiple commands in a text file in the /var/tmp folder and run them as a batch file. Following is an example of running a batch file containing commands copied from the /nsconfig/ns.conf file of a different appliance:

> batch -f /var/tmp/appfw_add.txt

Warning

Import commands are not saved in the ns.conf file. Before running commands from the ns.conf file to replicate the configuration on another appliance, you must import all the objects used in the configuration (for example, signatures, error page, WSDL, and Schema) to the appliance on which you will replicate the configuration. The add command to add an App Firewall profile saved in an ns.conf file might include the name of an imported object, but such a command might fail when executed on another appliance if the referenced object does not exist on that appliance.