Imagine you are working for company which has many checkpoint gateways and their licensing vary for each of them. In some point these licenses are going to expire and you have to restore them and manage them remotely.

You also would like to perform remote upgrades, patches and hot fixes of your devices.

And for all of that we have the wonderful tool named SmartUpdate! 😉

Licensing

There is two forms of licensing:

• Central – links license to IP of Manager. If you use this type of licensing you can reuse the same license for different gateway, if you dont want to use the license anymore in original gateway. so the manager has the ability to attach and detach gateway licenses as you need it. Licenses can be Attached, Assigned or Unattached. Attached is installed on gateway via manager and working OK. Assigned is allocated by manager for gateway but not installed yet. And unattached is neither allocated nor installed in gateway.
• Local – links license to IP of Gateway. So if you want to change the gateway or you want to use the license for different gateawy (so ip of the gateway is different) the license will not work. So you need to do some administrative work to get the new license.

You can get the license from D/L Center, User Center or from DVD.

You need to store all the licenses, patches, hotfixes locally in manager server. The folder is $FWDIR/conf. Then you can easily use the smartupdate tool for managing the licenses, patches, hotfixes, etc…

In the screen you can see how smart update looks like

In the screen you can see the manager server we are currently hovering. If you expand that (screen above) you can see all the gateways managed by management server and you can see all the versions of gateways, what they have installed etc.

If we right click on some gateway we can see upgrade packages, distribute package,…

The second tab is called Licenses & Contracts. It works same way – root in tree is management server and contains all the gateways. In the gateways you can see all the licenses. If you right click and select get licenses you get all info regarding licenses on the gateway.

When you are installing new update there is really cool feature called pre-install verifier. It verifies that you are installing right package to right gateway, it verifies that the communication between management server and gateway is OK (SIC), that the gateway got disk space required and if the packages has not been already installed on that gateway. Use that! Its in File-Packages-Pre-Install Verifier or in top bar icon