Ugh, this is such an amazing mistake. So, I am sure a lot of you are familiar with the little, old PIX 501 firewall from Cisco. Nice little firewall for a small office or home office, back in the day. Internet/WAN port and 4 switch ports, just like a little home 'router' device but with a lot more reliability and capability. Of course, it was ancient hardware even 5 years ago.
So they made the ASA 5505, 8 switch ports which included 2 POE ports for connecting a security cam or wireless access point or whatever you wanted. Perfect for deploying a small office. Everyone loved that little firewall. It has a couple drawbacks of course, nothing is perfect: plastic housing can cause it to overheat a bit if you put it in tight quarters with other gear, 100 megabit ports only, CPU is a bit on the weak side, but otherwise it was perfect. So now the next gen firewall is here!
ASA 5506-X, yay! Eight gigabit ports, metal housing with lots better ventilation, massively better CPU, 4GB of RAM and an mSATA storage drive so it boots nice and fast etc. Dedicated management network port too! They took away the integrated POE, but they offer a model with a built in WAP so that is not too bad. I am sure those who want wireless will be OK with that.
Buzzxplore version 2 crack 2. Those 8 gigabit ports: routed interfaces only. No L2 switching.
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So this perfect little firewall for a small office of 5 people or so (plus a stand alone WAP and printer or whatever) is now for. Am I supposed to have 5 DMZ networks? It can still do LACP. It can still do VLAN tagging.
Just not layer 2 switching on those lovely gigabit ports. Seriously, this is running some amalgamation of linux/bsd derivative software (at least in chunks) I am sure, so if I can turn my linux desktop with a 4 port intel card (or a handful of realtek cards) into a software switch, why can't that be working out of the box on this thing that is clearly marketed as a drop in replacement for a 501/5505?! This seems like a really serious misstep on Cisco's part. I am pretty much 100% sure there are companies out there with hundreds of 5505s deployed in locations where they are acting as a switch for a small network and telling them that they not only need to upgrade to keep up with new software and all but they also need to buy a separate switch and all (support contract if they want that, management, etc.) is really a big pill to swallow. Yeah, I could just get a $40 gigabit switch and connect it but now I can't see port status and error counters, can't remotely disable ports, etc. Can't do SPAN/Monitor sessions, can't see a lot of useful information. So I need a managed gigabit switch.
That's not $40. More like $200-400. Approaching doubling the cost of the new firewall now. Suddenly the 5506-X went from a no-brainer purchase to a well, it might fit. But with a lot of extra stuff to decide and figure out. I'm guessing this was probably aimed at pushing people onto a Meraki but once you tell people they can't drop in a replacement device with virtually the same config, you open the flood gate to looking at competition.
If I have to start from a fresh config, why shouldn't I look at Fortigate? Suddenly a 60D (at the same price or less than the ASA 5506-X) is looking mighty attractive. Can we milk more ongoing sub money from our clients? Or at least sell them additional hardware? We've had outages twice because of Cisco licensing. We actually owned the licensing but the keys got munched on the appliance and it thought we were out of compliance. One example: we got mobile VPN license (required for iPads, on top of the bunch of 25-pack clientless, and 250 client, and strong encryption.
) and when we activated mobile VPN key the strong encryption was taken away and all DES configs disappeared from our config. Absolutely unacceptable. We've also had failover ASA take over, and take over the primary VPN keys, which stopped working after just a few days not 30 days like they said. Another outage. We've also had ridiculous he-said-he-said between Cisco and our reseller regarding why we were not able to redeem licensing on cisco site.
And then there's CX appliance licensing and activation. Word 'Byzantine' comes to mind. Can we milk more ongoing sub money from our clients? Or at least sell them additional hardware? We've had outages twice because of Cisco licensing. We actually owned the licensing but the keys got munched on the appliance and it thought we were out of compliance. One example: we got mobile VPN license (required for iPads, on top of the bunch of 25-pack clientless, and 250 client, and strong encryption.
) and when we activated mobile VPN key the strong encryption was taken away and all DES configs disappeared from our config. Absolutely unacceptable. We've also had failover ASA take over, and take over the primary VPN keys, which stopped working after just a few days not 30 days like they said. Another outage. We've also had ridiculous he-said-he-said between Cisco and our reseller regarding why we were not able to redeem licensing on cisco site. And then there's CX appliance licensing and activation.
Cisco Asa License Key
Word 'Byzantine' comes to mind. Oh yeah, licensing is enough to put me off of a product. I can tolerate it for a device that bundles a service (like antivirus or URL filtering etc.) but for things like VPN session counts it is just a cash grab. The device has the hardware and software in place at the time of purchase but if you want to actually use the features you have to pay more. And they make it crazy difficult to do it too.
Asa 5505 Keygen Free
If it were simply a matter of 'load the device management interface, click to add the license and input your corporate credit card/account information and hit submit' I could almost stomach it. Instead it can be a multi-day exercise to find the right 'part number' and order it (unless you have a stellar VAR) and then you have to get the code, activate it and sometimes reboot to apply it.