How to Configure Cisco ASA 5510?

Cisco ASA 5510 is the second model in the Cisco ASA series (ASA 5505, 5510, 5520, etc.) and is fairly popular since is intended for small to medium enterprises. Like the smallest ASA 5505 model, the Cisco ASA 5510 comes with two license options: The Base license and the Security Plus license. The second one (security plus) provides some performance and hardware enhancements over the base license, such as 130,000 Maximum firewall connections (instead of 50,000), 100 Maximum VLANs (instead of 50), Failover Redundancy, etc. Also, the security plus license enables two of the five firewall network ports to work as 10/100/1000 instead of only 10/100.

The following we will see a simple Internet Access scenario which will help us understand the basic steps needed to setup an ASA 5510. Assume that we are assigned a static public IP address 100.100.100.1 from our ISP. Also, the internal LAN network belongs to subnet 192.168.10.0/24. Interface Ethernet0/0 will be connected on the outside (towards the ISP), and Ethernet0/1 will be connected to the Inside LAN switch. The firewall will be configured to supply IP addresses dynamically (using DHCP) to the internal hosts. All outbound communication (from inside to outside) will be translated using Port Address Translation (PAT) on the outside public interface. Let's see a snippet of the required configuration steps for this basic scenario: Step1: Configure a privileged level password (enable password) By default there is no password for accessing the ASA firewall, so the first step before doing anything else is to configure a privileged level password, which will be needed to allow subsequent access to the appliance. Configure this under Configuration Mode:

ASA5510(config)# enable password mysecretpassword Step2: Configure the public outside interface ASA5510(config)# interface Ethernet0/0 ASA5510(config-if)# nameif outside ASA5510(config-if)# security-level 0 ASA5510(config-if)# ip address 100.100.100.1 255.255.255.252 ASA5510(config-if)# no shut Step3: Configure the trusted internal interface ASA5510(config)# interface Ethernet0/1 ASA5510(config-if)# nameif inside ASA5510(config-if)# security-level 100 ASA5510(config-if)# ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0 ASA5510(config-if)# no shut Step 4: Configure PAT on the outside interface ASA5510(config)# global (outside) 1 interface ASA5510(config)# nat (inside) 1 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 Step 5: Configure Default Route towards the ISP (assume default gateway is 100.100.100.2) ASA5510(config)# route outside 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 100.100.100.2 1 Step 6: Configure the firewall to assign internal IP and DNS address to hosts using DHCP ASA5510(config)# dhcpd dns 200.200.200.10 ASA5510(config)# dhcpd address 192.168.10.10-192.168.10.200 inside ASA5510(config)# dhcpd enable inside The above basic configuration is just the beginning for making the appliance operational. There are many more configuration features that you need to implement to increase the security of your network, such as Static and Dynamic NAT, Access Control Lists to control traffic flow, DMZ zones, VPN etc. More notes: Visit router-switch.com (a leading Cisco supplier) to see more purchasing info of Cisco network hardware, popular Cisco routers, and Cisco switches, firewall security, etc. And also its blog provide all kinds of info, news and CISCO guides for all the CSICO fans