Routing & Security

Well, it has been busy these past few weeks but fun and challenging at the same time. My good friend Vybhav (tacack.com) is a great study buddy but I haven’t had time to really get on-line with him too much these past few weeks so I apologize to him for that. Hopefully I can get back on-track with him in the coming days (it really has been one heck of a week…).

So I focused largely on the IPS the past few weeks but feel that I still need more time with it. The only hands on I get is when I am going through my lab session which is only 8 hours a week for the next few weeks. I am still reading through the documentation though. I have a bunch of notes that I need to go through and make blog posts out of now. All in due time…

It is definitely a little overwhelming with the study process. I will be posting a new journal section quite soon that will be logging how many hours I am spending for study in the various technologies both labbing and theory.  I would also like to Congratulate Paul Stewart, the latest CCIE Security guru, on completing his journey. He has been a great help/mentor and I enjoy his blog posts and work on the Cisco Learning Network. Please find his blog in regards to his recent success here – Paul Stewart, CCIE 26009

Onto troubleshooting RTBH with Vybhav now… still working on that fun and challenging technology…

Well, it appears that Cisco has officially released its 64 bit IPSec VPNClient. The package is also half the size as to earlier versions, although the 32bit package is 3MB larger than this 64bit package. Even though this is a very needed tool for remote access, I still prefer the AnyConnect package which rides over SSL.

I ran into another big benefit of using Anyconnect yesterday… I had a business with several users that I had setup remote access for mention that their IPSec VPNCLient wasn’t working. Doing some investigating, I found they had switched their method of connecting to the Internet now by using wireless air cards. The VPN client would connect just fine over this connection but we were unable to pass any encrypted traffic. It was narrowed down to the ISP  blocking these encrypted packets over that aircard connection. However, we tested with Anyconnect which rides over SSL and it worked just fine.

Just remember that you need a CCO account to download this latest software.