Monthly Archives: June 2012

Wireless, Voice, Data Center, Security…Which area should I be heading to?

I finally got my CCIE Certificate in Routing and Switch last year. After getting the CCIE, it brought me into a new company in less than a month. CCIE is a dream of a lot of Engineers. However, once I get the CCIE Routing and Switching, I found that it is not enough to make me survive in the IT industry.

Netowrk nowadays is not only about routers and switches. It also contains a lot of different components. From all the projects I have done in my new job, a proper Corporate Network are made up of the following components/technologies:
– Cisco indoor Wireless Access Points
– Cisco Wireless Controller
– ASA Firewall
– Checkpoint Firewall
– Sourcefire IPS
– VMware Servers
– Cisco Nexus Series Switch

After looking at the above list, you will realise that most of them are NOT related to routing and switching. You will not get the knowleadge from studying CCIE R & S. Of course, I don’t find CCIE is helpful on above area at all.

Now, I need to think about to get more CCIE in different area to cover myself.

Zone Base Firewall is not hard at all

Cisco has released a Zone Base Firewall in the new Routers. If you have purchase a security license for your router, you can enable the firewall function.
The Zone Base Firewall works differently to the traditional ASA. You can define different interface to different zones. Then setup zone-pairs to define what traffic is allowed between those pairs.
I knew nothing about Cisco zone base firewall until recently I have to help a client to migrate an old PIX into zone base firewall on a new 3900 series router. There were 6 physical interfaces and 12 sub-interfaces (using dot1q trunking) on the routers. As the client required to have a highly secured environment, as a result I have to assign a zone for different interfaces.
If you have worked on Cisco VoIP, you will be familiar with the class based QoS. The way to setup zone base firewall is very similar to setup Class Based Policy for QoS.

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