Book Review: Cisco ASA: All-in-One Firewall, IPS, and VPN Adaptive Security Appliance
I was invited to a Cisco education round table during the Networkers 2009 in Barcelona and I got a voucher to hand in at the Cisco shop for participating in that round table. After I screened the available books at the store I finally decided to buy the book Cisco ASA: All-in-One Firewall, IPS, and VPN Adaptive Security Appliance (written by Jazib Frahim and Omar Santos) for about 5 Euro 
ASAs are another topic I basically didnt know anything about, but since we still use VPN Concetrators and their End-of-Life time is already running, I thought its a good idea to get started with ASAs to be prepared when the time comes to exchange those boxes. My main focus was/is on Remote Access (IPSec Client and Anyconnect) and WebVPN since we handle LAN to LAN connections over Routers and use a different Firewall vendor.
The book holds the following chapters:
- Introduction to Network Security
- Product History
- Hardware Overview
- Initial Setup and System Maintenance
- Network Access Control
- IP Routing
- Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA)
- Application Inspection
- Security Contexts
- Transparent Firewalls
- Failover and Redundancy
- Quality of Service
- Intrusion Prevention System Integration
- Configuring and Troubleshooting Cisco IPS Software via CLI
- Site-to-Site IPSec VPNs
- Remote Access VPNs
- Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
- Introduction to ASDM
- Firewall Management Using ASDM
- IPS Management Using ASDM
- VPN Management Using ASDM
- Case Studies
To get started with an ASA this book really helps and covers most things I was looking for, except PPPoE. For testing purposes I used an ADSL access and put the DSL modem into the bridge mode so I was able to build the connection via PPPoE. But to get that running I had to use the Cisco Configuration Guide for the ASA which is available in Cisco’s documentation section. Another thing to mention is, that the code used for examples in that book is before Version 8.x (guess its 7.x or something) so quite some commands got their names changed with the release change.
Im quite happy with that book and if you want to start your way into Cisco ASAs, I’d say have a closer look at it
OOBM Security, Callback Security überprüfen.
snmp-server host 10.0.197.233 12straumann65abc auf allen Geräten entfernen
aaa accounting exec default start-stop group radius, brauchts das?
Radius Server keepalives
ch01e005, Backup der Config. Management
WS-C3750 IQ erstellen
de06b099 ip inspect rate-limit anpassen
aaa authorization console wo nötig konfigurieren
Erledigt: at01b002, be01b002, uk01b002
CBAC und CDP
Erledigt: at01b002, be01b002, de01b002, de06b001, de09b002, dk01b002, es01b002, fi01b002, fr01b002, nl01b002, se01b002, uk01b002
End of HW Support Daten:
2621XM (ch01b011, ch01b012, de06b099, us01b011, us01b013, us01b015, ) -> October 9, 2013 ?? http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps259/eol_c51-464644.html
3745 (ch01b013, ch01b014, us01b012, us01b014) -> 25-MAR-2012 https://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps282/prod_end-of-life_notice0900aecd80444877.html
2950G -> December 30, 2011 https://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps628/prod_end-of-life_notice0900aecd804658c9.html
3550 -> May 2, 2011 http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps646/prod_end-of-life_notice0900aecd8029f777.html
VPNC3020 -> August 4, 2012 http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/vpndevc/ps5743/ps5749/ps2284/prod_end-of-life_notice0900aecd805cd5a0.html
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About
Im a network engineer working for an international medical company based in Basel, Switzerland. I began my professional life in 2000 after 4 years of an IT apprenticeship. I started as the Network Management System responsible with quite a lot other of other tasks inside the Cisco networking field. In 2005 I changed to my current employer where I changed my field of knowledge from part NMS part Networking to full time Networking. I also started to educate myself deeper into networking. After passing the CCNA and CCNP exams I wanted to go further with my education and took the CCIE R&S track instead of doing a school with lots of stuff Im not interested in 
I started the CCIE journey in August 2007 with the first of 5 workshops at the Cisco Network Academy in Rapperswil and passed the CCIE in Brussels at 07th of May 2008.
During that time I wrote a lot of documents to keep the stuff I learned and I thought it might be an idea to make it public so it might help other people on their path through the Cisco Certifications. I hope this site gets useful not only for CCIE candidates but also for other networking professionals on their search for knowledge.
If you have any questions or want to contact me, please drop me a line to pashtuk at gmail.com
