For businesses, the task of network and IT infrastructure monitoring remains highly important. A company cannot afford to ignore the security and performance of its network and IT resources. Nagios remains one of the most popular solutions for IT infrastructure monitoring today. An entire suite of software allows businesses to take control and have visibility […]
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In this configuration tutorial I will show you how to configure a GRE tunnel between two Cisco IOS routers. One of the routers is located behind a Cisco ASA 5500 Firewall, so I will show you also how to pass GRE traffic through a Cisco ASA as well. As you might know already, GRE tunnel […]
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In these days of uncertainty around employment, IT remains a solid option for those who either have the qualifications or those who are seriously thinking about a career change. In this article I’ll discuss the best-paying jobs, both in the core networking field and in network security as well. There are many roles and job […]
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The Cisco ASA 5500 series of firewall appliances has been in the market for a long time when they replaced the older PIX hardware firewalls. The new generation of-course listens to the name ASA 5500-X which is currently in the market. However many professionals and companies still have older ASA 5500 series firewall appliances in […]
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On my previous post I talked about Cisco ASA Active/Active configuration. In this post I will describe Active/Standby redundancy which is used much more frequently compared with the active/active scenario. ASA Active/Standby failover/redundancy means connecting two identical ASA firewall units via LAN cable so that when one device or interface fails then the second one […]
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It is a good security practice to configure a Warning login banner on your Cisco ASA firewall appliance for unauthorized access attempts. In this article we will describe how to configure such a banner for different ways available for connecting to the appliance such as using the graphical interface (ASDM), session, login etc. The command […]
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The Cisco ASA appliance retains clock settings in memory via a battery on the device motherboard. Even if the device is turned off, the clock is retained in memory. Configuring accurate time settings on the appliance is important for logging purposes since syslog messages can contain a time stamp according to the device clock time […]
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One of the easiest ways to configure simple remote access VPN functionality for your remote users is by configuring PPTP. This is supported on Cisco routers and will work with Windows OS flawlessly. What is PPTP PPTP (Point to Point Tunneling Protocol) is a quick and easy solution to offer remote access to users. Since […]
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The Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) is an integrated security equipment that can perform a variety of functions like firewall, intrusion prevention, VPN, content security, unified communications, and remote access. Among these functions, the ASA can also perform routing using popular routing protocol like Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), Open […]
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What is WPA2: WPA2 is short for Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 and is standardized under the IEEE 802.11i standard. WPA2 is a security protocol framework that is used to protect wireless networks. WPA2 is currently considered as the most secure method to protect a Wi-Fi network. It provides layer 2 based security and uses IEEE […]
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The usage of object groups (network objects, service object etc) is becoming more popular on Cisco ASA firewalls especially with newer OS versions ( 8.3(x) and later) . In the newer versions, network object groups are used extensively for the configuration of NAT mechanisms in addition to other uses. In this post I will show […]
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IP Security (IPsec) is a framework of open standards developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). IPsec provides security for transmission of sensitive information over unprotected networks such as the Internet. IPsec acts at the network layer, protecting and authenticating IP packets between participating IPsec devices also known as IPsec peers. IPsec has two […]
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In my enterprise work environment, our corporate private and public network spans across many buildings and locations and uses thousands of private IP addresses (in the range specified by RFC1918) and hundreds of public IPs as well. How do we handle the management of such a huge address space? The secret is an IPAM (IP […]
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