FireWall-1 FAQ: How Many Interfaces does FireWall-1 Support?
Please note: This content was from when I was operating my FireWall-1 FAQ site, which I stopped operating in August 2005. For some reason people still have links to this stuff on the Internet that people are still clicking on.
I am making this information available again AS IS. Given how old this information is, it is likely wildly inaccurate. I have no plans to update this information.
If you're still running versions of Check Point VPN-1/FireWall-1 where this information is still relevant to you, do yourself a favor and upgrade to a more recent release. If you happen to be running a current release and the information is useful, it's by happenstance :)
FireWall-1 versions prior to 2.1 supported 8 physical interfaces and 32 total interfaces (real + virtual). Versions 2.1-3.0b support 32 physical interfaces and 255 total (real + virtual). Version 4.0 was supposed to support an unlimited number of physical interfaces, but it appears to be limited to 64 real interfaces. NG up to NG FP2 supports 256 interfaces. NG FP3 and above supports 1024.
Note the above does not apply to IPSO. which has the following limits:
FireWall-1 NG FP2 and previous on IPSO supports 64 interfaces. However, each IP associated with the platform might get associated with the “interface” slot, depending on how old a version you are running.
In NG FP2 with the VLAN hotfix, this limit was raised to 256 interfaces, and FireWall-1 was a little more intellegent about how it allocates interfaces to IP addresses. In NG FP3 and above, FireWall-1’s limit is 1024. However, IPSO versions prior to 3.7 only support 256 interfaces. In IPSO 3.7, 1024 interfaces will be supported.
Note that each “VLAN” is counted as a seperate interface.
