StaticNAT

The tech sector is an interesting place to work and play.  This is even more true in the high dollar high stakes world of Enterprise networking.  So often customers get locked into a vendor and just keep drinking that vendors coolaid after the first sip.  In cases where that vendor is Cisco it usually isn’t a bad thing (“No one gets fired for buying Cisco!”) but it could be a very costly thing for your organization to focus on a vendor instead of a vendors core competencies and it standings in a particular market.  In doing research on competitive products to the Cisco MARS platform I stumbled across this site of cool links for competitive reviews of Cisco products versus other vendors products.  As with all “third party” testing you need to take these results with a grain of salt (most of these were commissioned by the competitor) but I’m sure there is some good info to be found.  Enjoy this link.

Any one who has tried to run Cisco’s ASDM (ASA Security Device Manager) with an IPS unit installed and running probably already know where this is going. Under Configuration and IPS your a provided a link that connects the broswer windows (ASDM) to the management interface of the IPS SSM module for the ASA. From there you are presented with ASA like login which is where the problems begin. If your are running the default java config the IPS screen will crash stating that you do not have enough memory allocated for java. In both Windows and Linux the solutions for this are pretty straight forward. In OS X however much searching and digging did not reveal the magic spot to change the memory settings. Thats where I come in. Read the rest of this entry »

I was on client site today troubleshooting some bandwidth problems. The first issue ended up being a power outage the night before had kept the edge router from coming up clean. A reload and a quick check of the config and life was good again. Currently this particular edge site for the client only has 1Mbit of their T1 and the rest is dedicated to their phone system. After being down a good portion of the morning the data link really took a hit when we got things working as email came flying in and everyone rushed our to see how their Ebay bids were going. So getting back from lunch we noticed that the link was still fully committed. The traffic pattern in PRTG indicated that it was some sort of update stream (we have fought this battle before) but with Apple Update servers blocked we were pretty sure it was not the Mac (95% of all systems on this network). However based on the network it was on and the location within that network we were left without other options. Read the rest of this entry »