About central management system settings

A centrally managed Smoothwall is comprised of an instance of a Smoothwall product running as a parent node and one or more compatible Smoothwall products running as child nodes, being managed by the parent node.

A centrally managed Smoothwall can be used in either:

• A load balancing configuration, for example, for large enterprise networks.
• A configuration replication environment, for example, in a "head office and branches" network where all Smoothwall nodes must have the same behavior.
• A status monitoring configuration, where the parent node just monitors the status of all children nodes and advises when to install updates and releases.

The parent node can be used to manage all child nodes in the configuration.

Every child node in a centrally managed Smoothwall must have a central management key installed and SSH enabled.

From time-to-time, you might need to work on a child node without the replication settings being applied by the parent. You can do this by disconnecting the child node locally.