Cisco strike again! Another exam without official study material. Seems if you want to pass an exam these days you either have to take the course, or use cisco.com and pray that you cover everything!

I recently took and passed this exam and used the following:

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This is quite an interesting feature, and one that you wouldnt usually expect on a device like this.

Basically, when running IDS/IPS/Snort or any other packet sniffer in promiscuous mode, you need a way to “mirror” traffic from your hosts, to your IDS box. With Cisco switches, this is achieved through the use of the “monitor” commands, which set up Cisco SPAN ports (Switch Port Analyzer).

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Just a note to say that we have added some RSS feeds to the top button bar. These are directly from Cisco and cover most of the important topics.

One thing to note is that this does not seem to properly format itself in Firefox for some reason or other. We will be looking into working a way around this in the coming days.
Thanks,

Ciscos version 8 software for the ASA is now available in the form of an Early deployment release. This release apparantly contains improvements for SSL VPN configuration.

The release notes are available here: ASAv8

I will report back after testing this.

Edit: Just upgraded both ASA and ASDM. The interface is vastly different from a visual point of view, but the configuration side of things still looks the same. Bare in mind that I have been playing with this for literally 5 minutes.

Some screenshots of the interface, These are from a Lab ASA5505. White gaps are where I have deleted private details. These were taken over an RDP session with a less than optimal colour palette. In reality, some of the GUI is actually ORANGE.

The graphs look like they have been vastly improved also, almost Vector style in that when you expand ASDM to full screen, it brings the graphs with it. Quite a neat touch. You can even right click and save these as .png image files for viewing later, or to add to reports for customers. I don’t recall this being a feature in 7.2 and earlier, but I will confirm this.

Ill try and post a more complete round-up of the changes over the weekend.

Here is a quick and dirty tip for filtering through your running config on a Cisco router.

Type “sh run” and press enter

hit the / button  and the search term, for example “interface”. This will take you directly to the interfaces section of the config.

It has quite limited use but does come in handy at times

21st Century Network

As a reference point, NTL (now Virgin Media) spent £13 billion on their infrastructure in order to deliver Cable broadband and business services.

I’m sure that moving away from PSTN is no bad thing…

Cisco Telepresence is the latest thing when it comes to communications over IP technology. Some of you may have seen this in the latest season of the hit TV show ‘24′ where the President is speaking to the Russian Premiere.

Basically, you have a ‘conference room’ set-up with your typical Cisco Voice Handset along with several large, high definition plasma screens. What this allows you to do, is have a full conference split across multiple locations. Anyone at the remote site is displayed in full high definition at the end of your table, meaning you are able to read body language as well as speak.

The most impressive part about this is that once the system is set up, it is no more complicated than making a standard voice call. You literally dial the Telepresence enabled extension number and away you go.

Only video can really do this justice, so here you go:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akzNWS5dygQ[/youtube]

Please excuse the Cheesey acting.

More information available here: Cisco Telepresence

Hi All,

We just wanted to give everybody a brief overview of what Cisconews is going to be doing in the coming weeks:

• Cisco News - Hardware, Software and Services.
• Security Bulletins.
• Reviews of Cisco Hardware and Software, not the one paragraph reviews you find out there, where it is clear the reviewer has never even seen the kit. Everybody who works on Cisconews works in the field of network security, with the majority of our work being with Cisco kit. We won’t be pulling any punches here either, if something is bad, we will say so.
• Tips and Tricks - Anything from one line commands in IOS, to tools and software used on a daily basis to manage Cisco products.
• Photo Gallery - It doesn’t sound like such a great idea on the face of it, but we looked around. There is a definite lack of high resolution images of Cisco kit, mostly you see the stock images published by Cisco. What we aim to do with the gallery, is provide close up shots so that people can see what interfaces/buttons/LEDs each of the products has. This can be handy when supporting a device you have never seen before!
• Discussions, both in the blog comments section and in our forums (not yet live). Hopefully this will attract some debate/community problem solving and a place to share issues.
• Configuration guides - These will primarily be aimed at the beginner. More advanced users are more likely to hit http://www.cisco.com and find whatever technical documentation they need. We are going to attempt to get step-by-step guides with Screenshots, in semi-laymen’s terms so that people can grasp this stuff quickly.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to leave them below. We value your feedback.

Thanks,

The CiscoNews Team.