routers

The Weather Channel goes HD with Cisco

Cisco Subnet — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:42:36 -0400

This week, The Weather Channel began broadcasting weather reports in High Definition format, with assistance from Cisco routers and switches.

Cisco has been working with TWC over the last year to upgrade its infrastructure to power a 24-7 live HD operation. Catalyst 6500 switches and Cisco routers shuttle digital shots of meteorologists reporting live from the new studio to the control room over 800 cables winding through the studio's raised floor. Cisco MARS security products are used for encryption between the studio, control room and other locations.

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More on counterfeit Cisco gear: FBI thinks it's a national security risk

Cisco Subnet — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:07:06 -0400

The FBI is freaking out over the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense has been sold counterfeit Cisco gear. The concern isn't so much over whether Cisco is getting the revenue it deserves - it's more about the possibility that hackers could be embedding backdoors into the counterfeit gear to allow them access into U.S. military networks at a later date.

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StillSecure to port routing/security app to Cisco's ISR

Cisco Subnet — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:40:04 -0400

StillSecure has decided to put its money where its mouth is and port an application to the Cisco Integrated Services Router. Cisco recently announced that the ISR can be made into a Linux application server with the addition of a Cisco Application eXtension Platform (AXP) blade card.

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Linux and Cisco -- convergence versus low-cost

Cisco Subnet — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:35:03 -0400

More from the Cisco-router-as-Linux-app-server debate. Don Marti on Linuxworld agreed with a Cisco Subnet post that listed lots of reasons why a Cisco router is not the best box to turn into a Linux app server. Agreed is too soft a word. He called it the "dumbest networking vendor idea since Network Access Control." Alan Shimel at StillSecure took Marti to task.

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Researcher demos at RSA how firewalls can be penetrated via DNS

Cisco Subnet — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:28:31 -0400

A security researcher Tuesday at the RSA Conference is going to demonstrate how routers from Linksys and other manufacturers can be abused by attackers to penetrate firewalls. According to a story by the IDG News Service, Dan Kaminsky has spent the past year studying how design flaws in the way that browsers work with the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) can be manipulated in this way.

According to the story:

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A New Way to Manage Cisco Routers

Channelguy — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:11:32 -0400

As Cisco finishes preparations for its 2008 Partner Summit in Hawaii, a Honolulu-based start-up is stepping forward with a new tool for configuring and managing Cisco routers. Okay. I’m a channel guy and not a hard-core technologist like a lot of you readers out there. But I do know that time is money and efficiency is a major part of this company’s pitch. Action Packed Networks (www.actionpacked.com) spun-off this year from Referentia Systems, a military R&D company working for the Department of Defense. The company was commissioned to design an easier way to manage networks, ranging from IT to satellites and radio. The end result, according to company president Nelson Kanemoto, had commercial implications as well.

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Juniper SSG or J Series

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:51:25 -0400

It does not matter whether it is J Series or SSG providing Routing services what is crucial is central management across the network and control with visibility of what traffic is being sent out...

Cyber Warfare: Frontline combat power gets a boost with the new Cisco ASR 1000 Router Series

jheary — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:51:12 -0500

Yesterday, Cisco officially announced its next generation, frontline, cyber superiority Battlestar, known as the Cisco ASR 1000 series routers. This new edge router series offers a 10 fold+ increase in routing, IPSEC, and Firewall performance versus previous midrange aggregation routers with these services enabled. Much has already been reported on it, but I wanted to focus on security. Is the new Cisco ASR 1000 Series unmatched in the raw combat power it is capable of unleashing on its enemies in cyberspace? Let’s dig into the performance characteristics and combat power of this next-gen edge router to see. And keeping in mind that raw combat power per se cannot guarantee cyber combat success, we’ll also look into the technological advances that it offers.

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3Com to release two MSR apps: Is this a chance to steal Cisco ISR customers away?

Cisco Subnet — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:40:20 -0500

3Com has Cisco's Integrated Services Routers squarely in its sights as it prepares to launch two applications - one for Asterisk VoIP, and the other for WAN acceleration/optimization - to support its MRS series of multiservice routers (learn more about access routers in Network World's Access Routers Buyer's Guide). The applications are built to 3Com's year-old Open Services Networking (OSN) initiative that allows its routers to run apps from third-parties.

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RE: Flash attack could take over your router

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:14:14 -0500

"Turning off UPnP would be overkill, considering that online criminals have not even begin using this attack" So you suggest we wait around until they do- THEN turn off UPnP? Wow- great advice!

7 Cisco bad luck happenings in '07

Cisco Subnet — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:12:31 -0500

Even the best of us has bad days or makes bad decisions, but when Cisco has them or makes them for whatever reason, they get reported widely. Here are our picks of the top-7 bad luck happenings in Ciscoland in the past year, ranging from the departure from Cisco of a high-flying exec to a wireless LAN data flooding to some major problems with Cisco VoIP equipment.

No. 7: The departure of Mike Volpi

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Securing Cisco Devices

tolanid — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 05:04:43 -0500

So far, we’ve discussed securing your devices by implementing passwords on your console, your aux, and your VTY. We’ve discussed using SSH rather than telnet for security purposes, and we’ve talked about using “enable secret passwords” on your accounts. In my last article, we discussed disabling protocols like CDP for security purposes since it gives away too much information about your network. There are still many other things covered in Global Knowledge courses that you can do to secure your network.

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RE: Solution to prevent Verizon redirects

david503 — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 11:55:39 -0500

I too experienced this problem, and discovered a very simple solution - just stop using Verizon's nameservers.

Verizon isn't so much redirecting typos, as it is 404 (page could not be found) errors. This means any time you access a non-existent file on the web, Verizon routes you to their search page.

Through FIOS you receive a basic router with a web-accessible admin panel. By simply changing the nameservers in the router's configuration, from Verizon's to a third-party set of nameservers, the redirect service is eliminated, and you will never again be bothered by Verizon's redirecting service.

RE: MPLS vs. WAN optimization, Part 2

Keao Caindec — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:09:39 -0500

As a network provider, we absolutely believe that WAN optimization (or at least components of optimization) should be embedded into the router. With a carrier-grade WAN optimization solution built into a router, cariers could offer a more cost-effective and simple to use managed service. I must admit, the irony is amusing: deploy WAN optimimization on a router to solve the inefficiencies of routing protocols. Keao Caindec CMO, Yipes Enterprise Services, Inc. kcaindec@yipes.com

Cisco Discovery Protocol

tolanid — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 11:49:51 -0500

Security is an interesting thing. Whether you are working on a router or a switch, there are certain essentials to consider. It’s also important to realize that there may be trade-offs, since you sometimes lose features while securing your network.

Securing your device could be as simple as not revealing any information about your network to anyone. Social engineering is a very common way to find out information about a network infrastructure and/or the protocols being used.

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VLAN Assignments

tolanid — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 12:00:47 -0400

It’s about time we do some fun things with our switch. We have just set up a basic IP address on it for management purposes, along with the default gateway so that it can be managed from remote locations.

Many other cool things can be set up on the switch that’ll make our lives a little easier. We can even have people plugged into one switch and still be part of a different logical network. This logical breakdown of the networks is known as a Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN).

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Switching Essentials

tolanid — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:02:29 -0400

Switching is an interesting topic. It could be an easy thing in your network or it could be something that keeps you up nights. Switching can be simple, allowing us to connect our users from various systems (host systems and phones), or it can be a complicated system with various advanced topics.

In this article, we will address the basics of this Layer 2 technology and help you get your switch up and running. For our examples, we will use Cisco’s 2950 switch.

In the past, some switches, such as the Cisco 1900 series, have given us the ability to configure the basics of switching using menus. I prefer to have more control over my switches, so I like the current switches that allow me to configure various components using the Cisco commands.

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Limiting Your VTY Access

tolanid — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:23:40 -0400

Having configured a username and password prompts for our console and VTY connections, it’s time to implement other security functions on our router.

One of the important things we can do with a router is implement access lists for basic security. There are two types of access lists: numbered and named. And each of those is available in two flavors: standard and extended.

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Securing Your Router

tolanid — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:22:23 -0400

Welcome back. So far, we have configured a Cisco router with a basic configuration, including IP addresses, host tables, routing protocol (RIP), basic timeouts on lines, and DNS entries. It only makes sense to get started with some other basic security items. So we will discuss here some basic configurations that make sense for any router configuration.

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Routing Essentials That Make Our Lives Easier – Part II

tolanid — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:52:36 -0400

The next item to make your life easier is a fix for something that has annoyed me for a very long time. Those of us who work with Cisco routers know that while you are connected to the Cisco console and working on configuring something, any kind of system messages you get just pop up on your screen with no consideration for what you’re working on at that moment. Suddenly, you can’t see what you were working on because you have a ton of these other messages on the screen. Of course, you can simply hit the tab key or to redisplay what you have typed so far. But that’s an extra step that might not be helpful if those pop-up messages keep coming like they do when you have, say, a flapping interface—that is, one that’s constantly changing state to up and down. Good news.

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