Drawing Firewall Clusters
When drawing dual layer firewall clusters, we need to clearly show the different zones in between the firewalls. For example, let say that we need to represent two DMZ between an external and internal firewalls. Here is how you might want it to look:
Now this looks pretty obvious to most people who have done this before, and I didn’t think much of it until one of my colleagues pointed out the shapes in the middle. How did I draw them ?
Drawing odd shaped…….um, shapes
Strangely, this is a really simple feature in Visio. I’ll assume that you have read some of the other posts on Network Diagrams and know how to put this diagram together.
Start by drawing the box that you want to represent the area:
Duplicate that box (Control-D), and rotate (Control-R) and then make it a bit smaller with your mouse.
Now select all the three objects, then Shape, Operations, Union
and this is what you should have. An oddly shaped shape.
Now send it to the back:
Styling
As far as Visio is concerned, this is still just a box. So all the other methods for styling the box for colour, line and distortion are still possible. Such as changing the line style, or making the corners more curved:
But try to keep it in good taste. An ugly network diagram is still ugly.
Other posts in the series
- Colour Blindness, Network Diagrams and Reliability
- Designer or Engineer, Artist or Painter
- Network Diagrams: Rotating Text on a Line
- Network Diagrams: Tips for Printing from Visio
- Network Diagrams:Zones on a diagram with Visio shape union (This post)
- Network Diagrams: Drawing complex VLAN Networks with IP Addressing
- Network Diagrams: Drawing Freehand Curves (and then fixing them)
- Network Diagrams:Aligning Shapes
- Network Diagrams:Locking the Background Shape
- Network Diagrams: Labelling an VLAN/IP Segment
- Network Diagrams: VLANs and IP Subnets
- Network Diagrams: Drawing the Background Shape
- On the Art of Network Diagrams and Presentation
About Greg Ferro
Thanks for the info. I’m always looking for good ideas/tips to apply to my Visio drawings.
I am always looking for good info like this as well. Keep it up.
I would be happy to see more firewally diagram techniques as well, like how to diagram multiple contexts, transparent mode, VPN or other kinds of more advanced firewall or IPS builds.
Thanks,
Tim
Great series.
As a suggestion for a future article, how about something on Visio page sizing and printing?
Somthing I often struggle with is scaling properly to print, especicially when I receive digrams from colleagues-they look fine on screen but end up etiher horribly small or chopped up when it comes to printing.
Thanks,
Mike.
Mike
Good suggestion. I wrote about it at http://insapiens.com/network-diagrams-tips-for-printing-visio/. Let me know if you have any suggestions ?
greg
Hi Greg, great articles I’ve learned some valuable tricks. Maybe as a future article, I’d be curious to know how you would go about drawing HSRP to connect 2 routers and the virtual standby to a network-
Cheers@!
Where do I find good Visio drawing samples. I’m new to security and I’m having a hard time showing the connections from an ASA 5520 F/W. I’m looking to be as detailed as possible showing the before (Watchguard) and after (ASA).
Thanks,
Jon