10 Quick Tips For Using Celestix Edge Effectively

Celestix’s Cloud Edge Security appliance is designed and built to simplify deployment and management of Microsoft remote access.  Here are 10 quick tips for using Celestix Cloud Edge Security solutions:

1.  Backing up to a Remote Share

For recovery purposes, the images need to be stored off the appliance.  This ensures the image is available in case of a hard drive failure.  To do this, perform the following:

1. Under System – System Imaging, click on Schedule
2. Click to check the Enable Schedule
3. After setting the schedule, click the “Copy Image to Share”
4. Enter the Share path
5. Enter the user name (domain and username) and the password
6. Click Save

2.  Setting up Alerts

In order to receive these email alert notifications, we recommend that you enable email alerting.  To configure email alerts, perform the following:

1. Click on Status – Alerts
2. On the right side, click on “E-mail”.
3. Select the radio button for “Enable alert e-mail”
4. In the dialog area, enter the information appropriate for your environment:
   1. The “To” address”
   2. The “From address”
   3. The SMTP server. Keep in mind that the SMTP receive connecter has to be configured for unauthenticated sessions.
   4. OPTIONAL: Click the “Test Email” button.

3.  Exporting Reports

Exporting reports for further analysis is simple with our management interface.  We can export reports to either CSV or to PDF.  To export a report, perform the following:

1. In reports, click the “Export” button on the right side of the header
2. Select CSV or PDF.
3. The exported file will download automatically.

4.  Filtering reports

We include broad filtering capabilities as well.  Filtering is as simple as clicking on the appropriate entry in the report tab.  In addition, filtering is cumulative, meaning you can have multiple filters.

To filter simply click on the value that want to update, enter your filter criteria, and click “Filter”.

5.  Out of Band Management

The Celestix 6400 and 8400 series appliances include IPMI for out of band management, in case of a DR or power outage.  To initially configure an IP address to the IPMI interface, run the following command line:

clxIpmiutil lan -e -I 1.2.3.4 -S 255.0.0.0 -G 1.2.3.1

Once the IP address has been assigned, you will be able to access and modify the IPMI settings through a standard web browser.

6.  Use the Contextual Help

A little known useful trick is the contextual help available.  Clicking on the ‘Help’ button on the top navigation menu allows you to quickly access help for that topic.

7.  A Better way to Manage Services

There will come a point where a Windows Service will be hung or fail to start, or quit unexpectedly, or you just need to restart a service.  The CESA platform provides a built-in way to monitor and manage services.  Clicking on System à Services brings you to the Services view.  From here, you can click on a service name to expand the entry, and stop, start, pause, or resume a service.  You can also set a service start up mode as well – Auto, Manual, or Disabled.

8.  Looking at Events

Being an appliance based on Windows Server, you can choose how to administer your appliance.  For event logs, we do provide a browser based option to view the primary event logs, and support for filtering as well.

To access the Event Viewer, click on Status à Event Viewer.  From here you will be able to access the various event logs, as well as filtering.

9.  Use the DirectAccess Client Diagnostics

As part of our CESA solution, we provide the ability for users experience DA connectivity issues to upload data directly into the appliance.  This process simplifies troubleshooting, and solves the issue of limited email connectivity using the native tools.

Clicking on CESA à DirectAccess Diagnostics brings up the page for review.  In here you will be able to manage submitted reports.

To enable clients to submit their information, we provide the link in the same page.  When the user clicks on the link, they will click on the “DATestRunner.exe” link, which is a wrapper program for the official Microsoft DA tester.  Once the user has run the application, the program will perform all actions necessary, and push the resulting information back into the appliance.

10.  Securely Publish the Client Side Diagnostics Page

As a security precaution, we recommend publishing the DA Diagnostics download page through a reverse proxy.  The paths that need to be published are:

https://<ServerName>:8098/app/dadiagnostics/

https://<ServerName>:8098/api/

Optionally, you can require pre-authentication, but this should not be necessary.

We hope that these quick tips are enough to get you going, but if you need more information or would like to talk to someone for related questions, feel free to email [email protected] or call us on 510.668.0700.