Category: cisco equipment

A Saudi man has been jailed for four years in the US, for selling counterfeit Cisco networking equipment to the US Marine Corps, Arab News reports.

Ehab Ali Ashoor was found guilty of supplying fake Cisco gigabit interface converters, (GBICs) through his company, CDS Federal Inc, to fulfill a contract with the US Marines. The GBICs had been intended for use at a Marine base near Fallujah in Iraq, but US customs offices identified them as inferior fakes.

Ashoor, who is resident in the US, supplied 200 of the GBICs to the Marine Corps, charging $119,000 for them, but it was discovered that the items were actually counterfeits, sourced from an eBay vendor in Hong Kong for less that $25 per GBIC.

The case was part of an operation, codenamed Network Raider, to clamp down on the supply of counterfeit or poor quality computer supplies to US military and federal agencies, which has netted over $143 million worth of fake Cisco equipment in over 700 seizures, resulting in 30 convictions.

Are you an Apple i-Phone user? Well this news is gonna make you love or hate the i-Phone in a new way. Cisco is extending its web conferencing and collaboration capabilities to the Apple iPhone 3G user experience, with Cisco WebEx Meeting Center and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace. That simply means if you are on the move you can still chat with your buddies in a conference with the same comfort you share with them at home. The hated part is even if you are at home, your boss can ask you to have conference with clients no matter what. Lol, like this or hate it but you can not ignore it anymore.

Click and Collaborate
The new Cisco WebEx meetings iPhone application, which is available for free download from the AppStore, allows users to simply click to join and actively collaborate in CiscoWebEx meetings. With Cisco WebEx Meeting Center application on the iPhone, users can view what’s being shared, see the meeting participant list, see the active speaker and chat with other meeting participants.

Online Meeting
The online meeting experience gives users the ability to take advantage of simultaneous web and audio conferencing capabilities from Cisco on both the 3G mobile and 802.11 wireless (Wi-Fi) networks.

Future Prospects
A future version of the solution will include Cisco WebEx Meeting Center as well as the ability to see meeting participants and the active speaker from Cisco Unified MeetingPlace. Users will be able to move in-session Cisco WebEx Meeting Center and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace conferences from the Apple iPhone 3G to an office environment and back, by transferring the audio to a Cisco Unified IP Phone and the web conference to a computer for a rich collaboration experience.

[Source: biz.yahoo.com]

Jamey Heary, CCIE No. 7680, who writes for Network World’s Cisco Subnet, recently wrote about a set of new features in Cisco’s IOS 12.4(20)T release. One of the features he describes is pretty neat: Packet Capture.

At times, the only way you can troubleshoot a network problem is to get a packet capture of some application or of the traffic on a suspect link. So you need to take your packet analyzer out to the site and capture data for this analysis. Distributed Sniffer and similar systems were created to allow network engineers to not always have to go into the field to capture data. With technologies like MPLS, remote sites will often communicate with one another without the data transiting a central facility where an expensive packet capture probe can be located.

So Cisco’s new feature that allows packet capture within the router will help the network engineer perform diagnosis and analysis without having to go onsite. Also cool is the fact that this packet capture supports both CEF and process switched packets. One of the neat features is that the packet capture data is exportable in PCAP format, so analysis tools like Wireshark can import the capture data.

As with any new feature, it is only available on a subset of routers – the ISR and 7200 series routers, which are software based. I’m sure that the hardware based routers will follow in the future as new ASICs support packet capture.

Take a look at Jamey’s article and its links to the relevant documentation for details on how it works.

The Cisco ASA 5500 series is the descendant of the older Cisco PIX 500 series firewall which was very successful in network security implementations. The ASA is not just a pure hardware firewall, rather is a full featured security appliance. What we mean by that is that the ASA hardware appliance, in addition to being a solid network firewall, is capable of working also as a content inspection engine, antivirus, antispam, IDS/IPS engine, VPN device, SSL device etc. The extra security functionality of the firewall is achieved with add-on module cards which offer the additional security features.

The Cisco ASA has one of the biggest market shares in the hardware firewall appliance market, together with Juniper Netscreen, Checkpoint, SonicWall, WatchGuard etc.

The ASA 5500 series is comprised from seven models, as we will see below.

This webpage is focused on the Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewall. I have been working with Cisco products (especially network security products) for more than a decade. In my current work position I’m responsible for a huge Cisco network that spans the whole Europe, and the Cisco ASA firewall is the foundation of our network security. The intention of this webpage is to share with you some technical information, tutorials and configuration examples about the Cisco ASA 5500 Firewall.
If you want to learn how to configure any Cisco ASA 5500 model version 7.x and 8.x, you can Download the Cisco ASA Firewall Fundamentals ebook here.