failover exec standby copy /noconfirm tftp://{ip address}/{file name} disk0:/{file name}

Without the /noconfirm it’ll fail. You also need a standby ip address on the interface facing the tftp server and I haven’t confirmed this but I think it might also need to be on the same subnet. I’m still having some trouble with a situation where the standby ASA would have to reach another subnet.

Keep in mind this will all change when iPhone OS4 comes out as it’s supposed to support SSL VPN’s. Finally. The IPSEC works perfectly fine for now though. I’ve not tested this on my iPad yet since I haven’t had it out of the house…and it’s not a 3G model. Don’t see why it wouldn’t work though.

And now the code:

aaa authentication login sdm_vpn_xauth_ml_2 local
aaa authorization network sdm_vpn_group_ml_2 local

ip access-list extended SDM_AH
remark SDM_ACL Category=1
permit ahp any any
ip access-list extended SDM_ESP
remark SDM_ACL Category=1
permit esp any any

The license does work as advertised. It’s a replacement for the IPSEC based client that Cisco seems to have stopped development on. I’ve been using it in numerous situations and it works great!

I just have a funny situation though where my client was exploring alternatives to Cisco. We got pricing for a couple of competitors including Sonicwall and Juniper and let me tell you…whoo-boy! I guess the others haven’t felt compelled to follow Cisco’s lead and they are still charging ridiculous sums for the SSL VPN clients. Of course there were howls of protest about how their clients did so much more and that if you wanted the same level of functionality you had to pay for Cisco’s full SSL VPN solution. All true, but who cares????

I want a simple client based SSL VPN to replace the IPSEC clients of old. I don’t need all the fancy clientless stuff. I suspect that’s true for a lot of customers. Cisco’s pricing strategy for the AnyConnect Essentials is smart not just because they don’t want to continue to develop the IPSEC client but because it drives business away from their competitors.

Cisco, your choice in focus these days mostly pisses me off but this is a real winner. A small bright spot in an otherwise dreary path you’ve taken. Now, if you could find a way to ship ASA’s before the summer I’d be happy.

Oddly enough, IOS wouldn’t allow the bad line to simply be deleted. The “;” had to be removed so that the no command included “at&ampt”

Probably some sort of a regex problem or an ascii escape character but it’s still kind of strange.

I’ve known for a long time that Cisco ASA’s don’t support sending ICMP redirects. Because of this the IPS’s default gateway couldn’t be set to the FW interface. If I did that they would never be redirected to reach the internal networks. I’ve never had a problem with IOS doing ICMP redirects though, so the IPS’s have been using the switch VLAN interface as the default gateway. The switch sends ICMP redirects when the IPS needs to get out to the internet and the traffic goes direct to the firewall.

Except it doesn’t. I could swear it did at one time in the past. Either my memory is faulty or an image update on the IPS broke it. Now, it seems the IPS tosses ICMP redirects. My guess is it worries about man in the middle attacks and and ICMP redirect is a possible sign of that. So even though the switch is doing the correct thing the IPS disregards it.

Moved the IPS management interface to one of the internal LAN’s and all is happy now.

I’m such a geek. The one cool new feature is that they have finally put in a USB console port. Actually mini USB. I’m not sure of the wisdom of using that over the already present regular USB ports, but that’s ok. I can’t find anything about how that’s going to work. I expect you’ll have to install a driver for USB to COM on windows just like you do with the USB to Serial dongles but this should be Cisco provided.

How cool would it be if there’s a hidden driver for that in Windows 7 already.

Now all we need is a wireless USB KVM and you could manage a whole data center of routers without running more cables. Better have some good security on that!

How is it that the king of the networking world, preacher of all things BC/DR, can be down for 2+ hours and no one thinks it’s a big deal.

If nothing else, it sure would be nice to get a root cause analysis from Cisco so we can have a “teaching moment”. If there’s a scenario where arguably the most savvy networking company in the world can suffer a catastrophic failure of a high availability service, we would all be well served to understand the details.

And Cisco’s response about the dangerous power failure at the data center that I tweeted about? I’m not buying that. If that happened then it should have shut down and failed to the DR site. I can’t believe that Cisco has all of Cisco.com in a single data center.

This is like your parents telling you every day not to smoke and then you catch them puffing away one day.

What’s the deal Cisco???

Turns out it was an echo problem. In his Putty settings he had Terminal:Line discipline options set to Force On for both Local Echo and Local line editing. He set these both to Auto and it worked fine after that.

Not sure how that get set but I thought I’d share. A quick google didn’t turn anything up that seemed similar.