Connecting to and Managing Cisco Firewalls
Also see “Allow Remote Management” KB ID 0000075 Problem To connect to and manage a Cisco firewall you need three things, To be in possession of a password, (and in some cases a username). Have the ‘Method of Access granted to you’ (or have physical access to the firewall). Know a ‘Method of Access’ to the firewall for management. Cisco Firewall Passwords Unless your firewall is brand new (in which...
FirePOWER: ‘No Authentication Required’ No Usernames
KB ID 0001460 Problem When attempting to track Users with FirePOWER, the FMC would not show any usernames? Solution Theres a lot of reasons this might not work, let’s take a look at a few of them. Firstly make sure the server running the ‘user agent’ is listed under System >Integration > Identity Sources > User Agent. It probably goes without saying, but over on server running the user agent, make sure it...
Cisco Firewalls and PING
KB ID 0000351 Problem With regards to Ping, out of the box a Cisco firewall will allow you to ping the interface you are connected to, so in a normal setup inside clients can ping the inside interface, and the firewalls outside interface can be pinged from outside. OK – to understand pinging through a Cisco Firewall you need to understand that Ping is part of the ICMP protocol suite, and unlike other protocols is not “connection...
Cisco ASA: VPNs With Overlapping Subnets
KB ID 0001446 Problem I’ve seen this pop up a few times in forums, and I’ve even seen people post “It cant be done, you will need to change one of the subnets,” but to be honest, it’s not that difficult. We simply have to do some NAT. This is the bit people struggle with, with VPNs usually we need to STOP NAT being applied to VPN traffic, and we still do, we simply NAT the traffic before we sent it over...
Cisco ASA ‘Ping Source?’
KB ID 0001445 Problem To be honest, the title is a little misleading, on an ASA you can specify which interface to launch a ‘ping’ from, but that’s it. I found myself in a situation today where I was working on a client firewall and I was trying to bring up a VPN tunnel, and I did not have access to any of their machines, and nor did they, (hence the reason for the VPN tunnel!) Well we can’t use good old...
Cisco Stacking 2960-X Catalyst Switches
KB ID 0001444 Problem You can stack up to 8 2960-X Switches*, you will require the stack modules and cables, (shown below). *Note: If you are studying for an exam, and the question is StackWize the answer is 9. Solution Stack Modules: Power down the switch, remove the blanking plate and fit the module, then when powered on you can use a show inventory command to make sure the module has been detected correctly. Switch#show inventory...
Cisco ASA: Allow VPN Traffic “Through” A Cisco Firewall
KB ID 0001428 Problem I got asked to put in a VPN for a client, this week, it went from a simple site to site, to a site to site with a Fortigate firewall at one end, to a VPN from and ASA to a Fortigate ‘through’ another ASA. It’s been a few years since I had to tunnel ‘through’ a firewall, and experience tells me, if you don’t have control of BOTH ends of a new VPN tunnel, anything that stops...
Cisco ASA: Group-Lock WARNING
KB ID 0001423 Problem You will see this error if you are pasting configuration into a Cisco firewall. This week I was manually converting an old 8.2 version firewalls configuration, to run on a modern (version 9) firewall, when I saw this; Petes-ASA(config)# username fred.bloggs attributes Petes-ASA(config-username)# group-lock value SOME-VALUE WARNING: tunnel-group SOME-VALUE does not exist Solution The reason you are seeing this...
Cisco ASA 5506-X: Bridged BVI Interface
KB ID 0001422 Problem When the ASA 5506-X appeared there was much grumbling, “This is not a replacement for the ASA 5505, I need to buy a switch as well!” and “I have six ports on the firewall I cant use” etc. While I understand that, and if truth be told the ASA 5505, was SUPPOSED to be used in SOHO environments where an all in one device, (with PoE) was a great fit. The problem was, people started throwing...
Cisco ASA: ‘Received an un-encrypted INVALID_COOKIE notify message, dropping’
KB ID 0001421 Problem Saw this in a forum today, and knew what it was straight away! While attempting to get a VPN tunnel up from a Cisco ASA (5508-x) to a Sonicwall firewall this was there debug output; Apr 06 00:45:21 [IKEv1]IP = x.x.x.x, IKE Initiator: New Phase 1, Intf Lan, IKE Peer x.x.x.x local Proxy Address 192.168.90.150, remote Proxy Address 10.252.1.1, Crypto map (Internet_map) Apr 06 00:45:21 [IKEv1 DEBUG]IP = x.x.x.x,...