Special characters and umlauts in SmartConsole

[Danny]

I asked AI Copilot regarding the current best practice for special characters and umlauts in SmartConsole.
It answers that it is still common best practice to stick to english and standard ASCII characters.
So I searched the cpm database for a special character 'ß' and found several entries as shown below.
How to deal with this? I would like to replace them. Does Check Point provide a script for this task?

[Expert@mgmt:0]# $FWDIR/scripts/search_postgres.sh -r -k -s ß
Searching for "ß" in cpm postgres  |

 schemaname |      tablename       |   columnname   |  rowctid
------------+----------------------+----------------+-----------
 public     | abstractauditlogbase | instructions   | (92,4)
 public     | accessctrlrule_data  | comments       | (1,2)
 public     | accessctrlrule_data  | comments       | (117,3)
 public     | accessctrlrule_data  | comments       | (609,2)
 public     | dleobjectderef_data  | blobonlyinfo   | (825,5)
 public     | dleobjectderef_data  | fwset          | (825,5)
 public     | dleobjectderef_data  | objectoverview | (825,5)
 public     | dleobjectderef_data  | tsdata         | (2584,4)
 public     | dleobjectderef_data  | varfields      | (2584,4)
 (9 rows)

[Lesley]

I would try CPM doctor script if you have it, otherwise TAC can share it. I would expect a check there for this stuff. 

CPM doctor will give the next step most of the time a SK, sometimes internal SK

[the_rock]

Good idea Lesley.

[Danny]

@Lesley : Good point. I got the latest CPM Doctor tool from TAC and the check "✔️ Network Objects Contains Non-Ascii Characters" is passed successfully, even though there are many special characters in this management database.

Interestingly CPM Doctor mentioned to be aware of sk161294, regarding whitespaces or newlines at the beginning or end of rule names which may cause Management HA sync issues. Good to know, I instantly applied the suggested fixes.

[Lesley]

White space issues are common. What is the reason you ask this question btw? For knowledge or is there an issue? If cpm doctor does not complain and there are no issues I would leave it 🙂 you want to remove the special characters?

[Danny]

I want to avoid future issues and always keep a firewall at best practice configuration. The only issue I'm aware of the the moment are long publishing times.

[the_rock]

Lets see if someone might know...

[Danny]

While there doesn't seem to be a conversion script yet, I created a SmartTask to avoid adding more Non-ASCII characters within changes.

[the_rock]

GENIUS!

[Lesley]

Check, I have no lab access now, but maybe with GUIdbedit you can search for the special characters to get a hint what objects are using them? 

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

Hi @Danny,

In this sk40179, the prohibited words and characters are included that must not be used at Check Point.

What are the characters and reserved words forbidden for use in Check Point Security Gateway and Sec... 

Special characters should be supported from version R80 onwards.

SK131473 is also very interesting:
Naming of network objects on R80.x Security Management server 

[Danny]

@HeikoAnkenbrand : These SK's are very well known and they speak the same language as AI Copilot. Best practice is to use standard English ASCII characters.

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

@Danny As you said, I would also only use English characters. But in principle, other characters are also allowed according to the SK.

[Danny]

@HeikoAnkenbrand : Allowed doesn't mean best practice. Even sk131473 has some exceptions at the end.