Playbook v1.2 - Now With Full Textual Search And AJAX Bling!

Max Caceres | December 16th, 2008 | Filed Under: Feature, Matasano, Playbook

We’ve just released a new version of our first product: Playbook v1.2.

Textual and structured search

Playbook v1.2 now includes full textual search to complement the previously available rule search. We’ve always known search would be important for Playbook: once you manage a certain amount of firewalls being able to quickly find policies referencing an IP address or service can be a huge time-saver.

Before v1.2 search was limited to what we now call rule format aware search, where only specific elements (e.g., addresses, port numbers, host names) within rules could be used as search terms. This form of structured search works great when you are looking for things that fall within the supported structure: it is often more accurate than its unstructured counterpart, and can provide additional benefits when the search terms are more complex than simple text or numbers. For example, using rule format aware search you can identify all rulesets that reference a given IP address, including those that do so by using a netblock that includes it (e.g., searching for “192.168.2.1” will return firewalls with rules for “192.168.2.0/24”).

But sometimes what you are looking for may not be structured information. You may be interested in all uses of an interface name, specific text within macros or all mentions of “FIXME!” in comments. That’s where textual search comes in. With Playbook v1.2 you can now search all your rulesets using both mechanisms, with the added benefit that textual search can also be used to search the wiki and all firewall doc you’ve written, to, for example, find all mentions of a customer name in your rules and doc at the same time.

Search is also aware of versioning, letting you search any arbitrary version of the content. For example, Playbook can search for all references of a name on last month’s version of the rules, or identify all recent changes affecting firewalls with rules that reference port 8080 (including those edits where the reference was removed).

New rule and wiki editor

Playbook v1.2 includes a new AJAX editor optimized for editing firewall rules right from your browser, with no additional plugins required. This new editor supports Playbook’s edit/preview/publish workflow for editing rules and other content such as firewall doc and wiki pages. A preview button lets you see what your content would look like before submitting your edit. In the few cases where a web-based editor may not be the best tool to edit rules, upload and download buttons let you work on your rules outside the browser.

Where do I sign up?

Check out the product’s website for more information on these and other features and to sign up to see the product in action. We’ve added new information on all major features as well as a few additional product screenshots (click on any screenshot to see a larger version).

Let us know what you think.