VACLs are another good layer of security to help control who can talk to who, much like access control lists that are in firewalls and routers, however the difference is VACLs operate at layer two of the OSI model. There could be situations where you have multiple hosts on the same LAN and want to block traffic from reaching certain hosts within that same network, how would you go about blocking that type of traffic without using a router or firewall? (Hint: Create a VACL)
So what has changed in the past 20 years? Take for example the network equipment that was manufactured in 1997, how did you configure that equipment? I would imagine it involved a serial port, HyperTerminal and trusty command line. Was API even a thing back in 1997, was it common to have an API interface in network equipment like today? Why do we even need an API on the equipment in the first place? What changed?
You have the FMC installed and connect to FTD device with configuration deployed but for what ever reason there is a problem and you need to enter the CLI on the Firepower device to troubleshoot the equipment and although you can’t configure anything you can do show and debug commands to troubleshoot via the CLI. Continue reading
We could use HSRP or VRRP to have a redundant default gateway for our PC/server networks. Although this works well we now have hardware powered-on and just sitting around waiting for its counterpart to fail, we are not actively using it. We could split up networks or use multiple default gateways within the same network but who does that? Well if your router or layer three switch happens to have that Cisco logo on it and a software release of at least 12.2(14)S, please welcome and “slow clap” the Gateway Load Balancing protocol, who has been around since 2002! Continue reading
This is short and hopefully helpful post on how to manually update Cisco Firepower Devices. I have run into this problem a couple of times which is pushing this update with the FMC sometimes just fails and it never really seems to download the update to the Firepower sensor. Continue reading
