Introduction

Migrating another firewall to Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) can be a daunting task. Depending on the role of the firewall, it can have thousands of ACL entries, network and service objects and network address translations (NAT). Fortunately, for anyone that is migrating to Cisco FTDs that are managed by Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC), Cisco provides a firewall...

Cisco leads the word in Corporate on premises telephony and collaboration solutions. For the past couple of years its trying to mimic this offering via its cloud services and Webex Calling. Webex Calling has been maturing pretty quickly and billions of dollars of investments result in new features and expansions on a weekly basis.

In this blog, we will go over some of their latest features and...

Cisco SD-WAN (formally Viptela) is quickly becoming the go to WAN solution for Cisco customers. As companies are looking to replace their aging DMVPN solution, Cisco SD-WAN has become the logical choice. Companies can stick with the same ISR platform running IOS-XE that they already know, and in some cases can upgrade their existing routers to work with SD-WAN. But this blog isn’t a sales pitch...

There may be certain situation when you need to reset a Cisco FTD appliance back to factory default to get a clean start. One such example is during a deployment I encountered a Cisco Bug for FTD version 7.0.4 locally managed by FDM. The bug caused a corruption in the database that cannot be repair and configurations from the FDM are not synced with the LINA, the ASA portion of the FTD. There...

I wanted to cover a new IOS feature that I learned during Cisco Live. VOIP Trace for CUBE is a new feature that can help engineers troubleshoot issues on CUBE deployments. It’s enabled by default, but you will need at least IOS-XE 17.3.2 or higher.

I was upgrading a Catalyst 3850 48 port switch from version 03.07.01E to version 16.12.07. I’ve done this upgrade quite a few times. Followed the Cisco upgrade procedures that you find online when you download your software file. I always have them open, or the command needed to start the upgrade process. Console access showed me that my switch after my reload ended up in ROMMON mode.

Whether you’re migrating from On Prem Call Manager to WebEx Calling, Spark to WebEx Calling or just have some old phones you want to add to your WebEx Calling Deployment; you will need to convert your phones from their Enterprise Firmware to the cloud supported MPP firmware.

Cisco Meraki recently introduced the MG series Cellular Gateways to be a reliable solution as a backup internet uplink. In the event that the primary internet uplink goes down, the MG gateway will provide high availability for internet connectivity via wireless WAN connectivity using a cellular network. The MG Series also simplifies configuration and management using Meraki’s dashboard.

You read that right! At Cisco Live this year they introduced the ability to add Catalyst switches to the Meraki dashboard. Finally a use for the unused DNA licenses! The switches are monitored in read-only mode, so you still need to manage the switches the old fashioned way, however Meraki's traffic analysis and troubleshooting tools are available for use. This is great for Catalyst owners who do...

Hoteling is bringing Extension Mobility (Call Manager realm) to the cloud-based WebEx Calling solution. It allows a user to pick any phone and login to it using their extension and voicemail pin number.