Help needed understanding Tasman

I've used just one other router and it was very simple compared to what I have now. I have a Tasman 1002.

The place that I start getting lost and confused is there seems to be two methods to do things but I assume I just don't understand. The Tasman has "filters" which I have not completely figured out but I think I could. They seem to be roughly the same as what is in BSD.

But then it also has a whole area of "firewall" commands. They talk about concepts like maps, policies, access-list's, access-group's, etc. Again, I think I can eventually make sense of it but I don't understand why there are two systems that appear to do the same thing.

On a slightly different topic, if there was just a global over view of how the Tasman software was designed, how the filters and firewalls work from a high level, that would help tremendously. Or some pratical examples. The examples in the Tasman guide seem utterly silly to me.

Oh... another question: With the concepts of objects and in particular an address object in the Tasman software, how dynamic is it? If I get everything defined and set up and I have a "unfriendly" address object and a rule that says to reject everything from any address specified by that address object, if I update the address object and add a new address into it, is that change going to ripple through everywhere it needs to ripple through to?

 

Here is the information you are seeking:
http://www.tasmannetworks.com/support_doc_libUserManl.html

Thanks,
Mav