Configuring a Cisco ASA 5510

Binary Royale is an IT consultancy company based in the East Midlands. We spend all of our time with clients, helping them to make good decisions about their IT. When we come across issues that would be useful to others we “try” to post the answers on our website – binaryroyale.com . We cover Derby and Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire mainly, but do also have clients further afield. Please browse our website to see what we offer – thanks, and enjoy the blog

Recently I’ve had to configure a couple of firewalls for different clients, so I thought I’d write up some notes on putting a basic configuration in place.

The model I have been using is the ASA 5510, with Security Plus license. The Security Plus license converts ports 0 and 1 on the firewall to be gigabit ethernet – worth noting when you’re assigning roles to interfaces. It’s unlikely that your WAN connection will be anything close to gigabit speed, therefore configuring the WAN on ports 0 or 1 effectively ‘wastes’ this additional speed. The Security Plus license provides additonal benefits, but I won’t go into them here – you can find all the details on the Cisco website.

I’ve had to start with both a new unit, and a second hand one, so I’ll go through the process of resetting a used unit back to factory settings. For all of the following, I will assume that you have physical access to the unit, and are using the console for configuration via the command line. I’ve split the instructions up into a number of discreet posts based on different parts of the configuration process – links below:

As always, these instructions are written from my experience, and worked for me. You should test them in a lab environment to ensure that they work for you before trying them out on production equipment.

Resetting a Cisco ASA 5510 to factory default

Resetting the passwords on a Cisco ASA 5510

These articles are to follow soon:

Installing a basic config on a Cisco ASA 5510

Configuring a Site-to-Site VPN on a Cisco ASA 5510