Preventing unwanted peering

Enhanced autodiscovery greatly reduces the complexities and time it takes to deploy SteelHeads. It works so seamlessly that occasionally it has the undesirable effect of peering with appliances on the network that aren’t in your organization's management domain or your corporate business unit. If an unknown, or unwanted, appliance appears, create a pass-through peering rule to prevent it from peering and remove it from your list of peers. In the rule, specify the source as the unwanted appliance’s subnet, and the destination as your local network subnet.

Alternatively, you can create a rule that allows peering from your organization’s subnet and denies it otherwise. You may want to place it as the first rule in the list.

Add a second peering rule to pass through all other traffic.

With this method, your local SteelHead responds to probing appliances by either peering—the accept rule is matched, or passing through the probe and not peering—the pass-through rule is matched.

The unknown appliance appears in the Current Connections report as a Connected Appliance until the connection times out. After the connection becomes inactive, it appears dimmed. Restart the service to completely remove it.