Black Box ServSwitchTM manual Placing Wizard IP Plus alongside the firewall, Ports

Placing Wizard IP Plus alongside the firewall

Wizard IP Plus is built from the ground-up to be secure. It employs a sophisticated 128bit public/private key system that has been rigorously analysed and found to be highly secure (a security white paper is available upon request). Therefore, you can position the Wizard IP Plus alongside the firewall and control hosts that are also IP connected within the local network.

IMPORTANT: If you make the Wizard IP Plus accessible from the public Internet or from a modem, care should be taken to ensure that the maximum security available is activated. You are strongly advised to enable encryption and use a strong password. Security may be further improved by restricting client IP addresses, using a non-standard port number for access or limiting remote access to dial up connections only.

Ensuring sufficient security

The security capabilities offered by the Wizard IP Plus are only truly effective when they are correctly used. An open or weak password or unencrypted link can cause security loopholes and opportunities for potential intruders. For network links in general and direct Internet connections in particular, you should carefully consider and implement the following:

•Ensure that encryption is enabled.

By local configuration or by remote configuration.

•Ensure that you have selected secure passwords with at least 8 characters and a mixture of upper and lower case and numeric characters.

By remote configuration.

•Reserve the admin password for administration use only and use a non- admin user profile for day-to-day access.

•Use the latest Secure VNC viewer (this has more in-built security than is available with the Java viewer). To download the viewer.

•Use non-standard port numbers.

•Restrict the range of IP addresses that are allowed to access the Wizard IP Plus to only those that you will need to use. To restrict IP access.

•Do NOT Force VNC protocol 3.3. Remote configuration. Protocol 3.3 is a legacy version that does not offer any encryption.

•Add a further level of inherent security by restricting access only via modem or ISDN dialup.

•Ensure that the computer accessing the Wizard IP Plus is clean of viruses and spyware and has up-to-date firewall and anti-virus software loaded that is appropriately configured.

•Avoid accessing the Wizard IP Plus from public computers.

Security can be further improved by using the following suggestions:

•Use a KVM switch with On-Screen-Display driven security access and an auto- logout (after inactivity) feature to provide a second level of security.

•Place the Wizard IP Plus behind a firewall and use port the numbers to route the VNC network traffic to an internal IP address.

•Review the activity log from time to time to check for unauthorized use.

•Lock your server consoles after they have been used.

A security white paper that gives further details is available upon request from Black Box.

Ports

In this configuration there should be no constraints on the port numbers because the Wizard IP Plus will probably be the only device at that IP address. Therefore, maintain the HTTP port as 80 and the VNC port as 5900.

Addressing

When the Wizard IP Plus is situated alongside the firewall, it will require a public static IP address (i.e. one provided by your Internet service provider).

More addressing information:

Discover DHCP-allocated addresses

DNS addressing

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