Commit, Validate, and Preview Firewall Configuration Changes

1. Configure the scope of configuration changes that you will commit, validate, or preview.
   1. Click Commit at the top of the web interface.
   2. Select one of the following options:
      • Commit All Changes (default)—Applies the commit to all changes for which you have administrative privileges. You cannot manually filter the commit scope when you select this option. Instead, the administrator role assigned to the account you used to log in determines the commit scope.
      • Commit Changes Made By—Enables you to filter the commit scope by administrator or location. The administrative role assigned to the account you used to log in determines which changes you can filter.

      To commit the changes of other administrators, the account you used to log in must be assigned the Superuser role or an Admin Role profile with the Commit For Other Admins privilege enabled.
   3. (Optional) To filter the commit scope by administrator, select Commit Changes Made By, click the adjacent link, select the administrators, and click OK.
   4. (Optional) To filter by location, select Commit Changes Made By and clear any changes that you want to exclude from the Commit Scope.
      If dependencies between the configuration changes you included and excluded cause a validation error, perform the commit with all the changes included. For example, when you commit changes to a virtual system, you must include the changes of all administrators who added, deleted, or repositioned rules for the same rulebase in that virtual system.
2. Preview the changes that the commit will activate.
   This can be useful if, for example, you don’t remember all your changes and you’re not sure you want to activate all of them.

   The firewall compares the configurations you selected in the Commit Scope to the running configuration. The preview window displays the configurations side-by-side and uses color coding to indicate which changes are additions (green), modifications (yellow), or deletions (red).

   Preview Changes and select the Lines of Context, which is the number of lines from the compared configuration files to display before and after each highlighted difference. These additional lines help you correlate the preview output to settings in the web interface. Close the preview window when you finish reviewing the changes.

   Because the preview results display in a new browser window, your browser must allow pop-ups. If the preview window does not open, refer to your browser documentation for the steps to allow pop-ups.
3. Preview the individual settings for which you are committing changes.
   This can be useful if you want to know details about the changes, such as the types of settings and who changed them.
   1. Click Change Summary.
   2. (Optional) Group By a column name (such as the Type of setting).
   3. Close the Change Summary dialog when you finish reviewing the changes.
4. Validate the changes before you commit to ensure the commit will succeed.
   1. Validate Changes.
      The results display all the errors and warnings that an actual commit would display.
   2. Resolve any errors that the validation results identify.
5. Commit your configuration changes.
   Commit your changes to validate and activate them.

   To view details about commits that are pending (which you can still cancel), in progress, completed, or failed, see Manage and Monitor Administrative Tasks.