Cisco ASA – ‘access-group’ Warning
KB ID 0001035 Problem I’ve been writing Cisco ASA walkthroughs for years, and littered all over PeteNetLive you will see me warning readers every time I use access-group commands. So I’ve finally got round to putting this article up so I can reference it in future. What is an Access-Group command? You use an access-group command to apply an access-list to an interface, in a particular direction (in or out). Although I...
Cisco ASA – Policy NAT
KB ID 0001042 Problem I’ve been working on a large firewall deployment for a client, each of their DMZ’s have both a production and a management network. nothing particularly strange about that, but each of their DMZ’s has its own firewalled management network and it’s routable from the LAN. So If I’m an admin and I want to talk to a Linux appliance in their DMZ via its management interface, my traffic...
Cisco ASA – ‘Prove it’s Not The Firewall!’
KB ID 0001049 Problem Yeah, it’s funny because it’s true! The article title might not sound like the most professional approach, but when the ‘Well it’s not working now’ finger gets pointed at the ‘firewall guy/girl’, they need to ascertain two things; 1. Is the problem actually the firewall, if not then help the frustrated party track down the actual problem. 2. If your problem IS the...
Cisco ASA – View The Contents of an Object and Object-Group
KB ID 0001043 Problem My colleague loves the ASDM, I put up with it and prefer command line. We were troubleshooting a problem the other day and he said, there this is why I prefer the ASDM, just ‘hover’ over an object-group and it will show you the contents of it. Now if (like my test firewall above) you only have a few hosts, then I don’t see the point, but if you have a very complicated config with hundreds of...
Cisco ASA – Disable SSLv3 (Force TLSv1.0) – Mitigate POODLE
KB ID 0001052 Problem By default the Cisco ASA will allow connection via SSLv3. The POODLE exploit works by forcing SSL to fall back to SSLv3 and then decrypting that communication. However you are still not completely protected as per this Threat Validation, so the ASA platform can still be attacked via TLSv1.0. Note: At time of writing TLSv1.2 is not supported, but it is on the road-map for version 9.3(2). So this procedure will not...
Cisco ASA ASDM – Packet Tracer Wont Work
KB ID 0001051 Problem I don’t usually use the graphical packet tracer tool, but I did this week, and this happened; Following error(s) occurred- packet-tracer input inside {protocol} inline-tag -l {source} {source port} {target} {target port} xml %Invalid input detected at ‘^’ marker Solution Well from CLI it worked fine, so I’m guessing it’s a fault in the ASDM. An Internet/forum search threw up a load...
Cisco ASA 5500 – Performing NAT for Two (or More) internal IP’s to a Spare Public IP
KB ID 0001057 Problem I was in the PIX/ASA area at EE last night, and a poster asked if they could perform NAT on a couple of internal IP addresses to a spare public IP that they had. I had done this for a client some time last year when I performed and upgrade from 8.2. Anyone who has ever done a large upgrade on an ASA to the ‘new’ NAT system, will appreciate this is usually the area where the upgrade has a problem. So...
Cisco ASA – Changing the Outside IP Address
KB ID 0001081 Problem I see this question get asked a lot on forums, most people never touch the firewall, ‘if it’s working leave it alone’. And that’s great until you move offices, or get a newer faster (or cheaper) Internet connection. What if you have lots of public IP addresses? What if you have VPN’s (or AnyConnect clients). What’s the best way to do this with a minimum of downtime? Note: If...
Cisco ASA 5500 – Sub Interfaces and VLANS
KB ID 0001085 Problem You can take the physical interface of a Cisco ASA firewall, (or an ether channel) and split it down into further sub-interfaces. This way you can set multiple VLANs to use this interface as a gateway at the same time whilst still separating the traffic. In this scenario I’m going to have two VLANs, one for my wired clients, and one for a ‘Guest WiFi’ that I’m setting up. I want the guest...
Cisco ASA – Port Forwarding To A Different Port
Port Translation KB ID 0001087 Problem Note: This is for Cisco ASA 5500, 5500-x, and Cisco Firepower devices running ASA Code. A very long time ago I wrote an article about how to port forward from a public IP address to multiple servers for RDP. Basically you would connect to the firewall using various different ports, and the firewall would change the port to the correct one for RDP (TCP port 3389, unless you changed it on the...