MS is a complex central management facility for PNS firewalls. Besides firewall-centric configuration settings, such as firewall policies, packet filter rules, it allows for the configuration of several basic parts of the operating system. In fact, one of the design goals of MS was to eliminate the need for command-line configuration of the operating system and PNS as much as possible. Therefore tools are provided to perform basic, operating system–level configuration tasks.

The Networking component that is present by default for each host in the Configuration tree serves this purpose by providing access to all the relevant network–related configuration areas of the host's operating system. The possible settings in the Networking component are mostly related to ordinary network configuration issues and there are hardly any variables directly related to firewalling functions.

The main window of the Networking component is divided into the following four tabs.

Figure 5.1. Tabs in the Networking component