Introduction¶

This chapter focuses on the functionality of Zentyal as a gateway. Zentyal can make the network more reliable and secure, manage bandwidth and help to create policies for connections and content.

One of the main sections is dedicated to the firewall module, which allows you to define rules to manage incoming and outgoing traffic from both the server and the internal network. To simplify the firewall configuration, you will categorize the types of traffic depending on their origin and destination, and you will also make use of the defined objects and services.

When accessing the Internet, you can balance the load between several connections and define different rules to use one or the other depending on the traffic.

Using RADIUS, you can authenticate the users in your network. This is specially useful if you want to avoid the security problems associated with symmetric password on wireless networks.

Another necessary service in most of the deployments is the HTTP Proxy. This service allows you to speed up your Internet connection, storing a web cache and establishing different content filtering policies.

Finally, thanks to the IDS module, you can stablish heuristics to automatically detect a varied range of security threats, in both internal and external networks. Using the IPS module, it is also possible to program automatic reactions to these threats, stopping incoming attacks before any harm to your systems is done.