One of the things MARS 6.x boasts is the ability to share custom parsers, the thing is finding the sharing page on the pro-net forum is a bit of a nightmare, well this thread found the answer …

Link to Cisco Mars Custom Parser Packages

According to Cisco’s documentation on configuring syslog on a CAM, you can only forward the NAC logs to a single external log server. If you’re willing to get down and dirty with the Linux operating system underneath, then this document will show you that this is simply not the case.

To get started, tweak the default logging settings within the NAC web interface, this screen-shot shows I’m sending the syslog to the local host as local6 messages, this change will send a copy of the “normal” NAC event logs to the localhost syslog server.

I’ve been having problems getting my Cisco MARS Local and Global controllers to synchronise their topologies. This error message vexed me for a few days, but thankfully Cisco’s TAC solved it for me.

If you read Ciscos troubleshooting guides they will tell you to check that the MARS Local & Global controllers are running the same version, and to check that the SSL certificates are copied/pasted correctly.

If after checking the above Cisco recommendations and the additional basics ( network connectivity / ntp / timezones etc) check that both MARS boxes are running and have downloaded the same version of IPS signatures; under Admin -> IPS Signature Dynamic Update Settings -> Update Now.

Boot From CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-1of6.iso … then type “linux rescue”, choose your keyboard layout and the images show what happened next!!!

VMware Host: Windows 2003 SP1
VMware Server Version 1.101

Emulating software is a very grey area for Cisco, they make their money by selling boxes so I guess officially Cisco don’t approve of things like GNS3 and PEMU. BUT cisco make a lot of their money from techies training in Cisco products who then get their management to buy boxes their certified in, as a result cisco appear to turn a blind eye to emulating their products for personal training purposes

Why can’t I remember this command?

In order to remove the entire access list, use the clear configure access-list command

I’ve been implementing a few Cisco ASA’s recently, and I blogged about this strange behavior; well I came across another one yesterday.

Take a look at this debug arp….

Note to self, the ports I need to allow thru the Un-Authenticated ACL for Active Directory SSO to work…

TCP 88,135,389,636,445,1025,1026
UDP 88,389,636 

I came accross something odd the other day, I had some Cisco IP Phones on a DMZ interface and the Call Manager was behind the inside interface. If you made a call from a 7940 to a 7940 everything worked fine, if you made a call from a 7905 to a 7940 it failled!

I ran a packet capture and found that the phone was “bouncing” the RTP stream off the firewall rather than connecting directly to the peer phone… very weird! The problem was solved by enabling…

same-security-traffic permit intra-interface

I thought I post this for some future googlers!

I tweeted a little while ago about Nokia recently supporting interface failover within IPSO, well it looks like Cisco’s ASA Version 8 software can do it now too!

The following example creates two redundant interfaces:

asa(config)# interface redundant 1
asa(config-if)# member-interface gigabitethernet 0/0
asa(config-if)# member-interface gigabitethernet 0/1
asa(config-if)# interface redundant 2
asa(config-if)# member-interface gigabitethernet 0/2
asa(config-if)# member-interface gigabitethernet 0/3

Reference: Adding a Redundant Interface

As it’s late, and I’m bored waiting for a customer call back, I thought I’d write about something both amusing & irritating. Recently I purchased a copy of Network Security Technologies & Solutions from Amazon, as I’m in no hurry I opted for the free royal mail delivery option. When I got home I found the Amazon box on my door-step and surprising the the box was open!!!

You hear about things going lost in the mail regularly and I can only presume that someone responsible for sorting the parcel spotted a rather heavy box from Amazon and thought it must be some expensive gadget, how disappointed they must have been to see that it was a dull old Cisco book

If you saw this tweet, you’ll see that a little while ago I had some fun with Playstation 3 online gaming; it’s probably my own fault because I’m possibly the only person with a version 6 Cisco Pix Firewall at home in front of their playstation.

If you want to get online gaming working though your firewall there’s a really good online reference here and my specific grumble about having to open up a shed load of ports for EA’s Burnout paradise is documented in their support area.

To summarize, this is what I’ve got open:

Recently I was asked if I could help setup a VPN connection between an Apple iPhone and a Cisco VPN Concentrator 3000, my 1st round of googling didn’t look good, there’s a discussion here complaining about how crap vpn support on the iphone is; further searching lead me to a Cisco document which specifically targets mac clients, this document is for ASA configuration, but if you look carefully* everything you need is in there.

*No, I didn’t get this working 1st time, it took me a good couple of hours of googling, but looking back I can see that all the info is there.

I’ve had a new request in recently, as part of a move to SCEP + Certificates (away from pre-shared keys) a customer has asked if we could use the PKI CA build into Cisco’s router IOS. Now is this is a new idea to me; in the past people have either “plumped” for Microsofts CA implementation or cooked something up themselves with openssl.

Cisco’s IOS Security Guide (you may need a CCO Login) clearly states that it’s possible and that it supports SCEP auto-enrolment, so I thought I’d give it a go!

I wanted to write a document on how to import RADIUS VSA’s (vendor specific attributes) into cisco’s ACS SE (Solution Engine) appliance, the reason being that I couldn’t find any good examples on the net and cisco’s documentation just wasn’t clear enough.

My purpose was to use RADIUS authentication between a Nokia IPSO appliance such that users who access voyager or ssh get authenticated centrally; for RADIUS authentication to work your authentication server (in this case ACS) needs to supply the AAA client (in this can the ipso box) with a “return list attribute”. By default ACS doesn’t have the nokia attributes; to import attributes you need to get your hands on a dictionary file, for nokia ipso it’s /etc/nokia.dictionary - I’ve a copy here.