Don't use Cisco's GUI!!!

Man, I'd heard that the Cisco GUI was no good, but I thought it was CLI bigots that just don't like Graphical interfaces.

Was I wrong.

I blew five hours trying to get a PIX firewall to work with the GUI. Finally dropped to the console and had it working in 45 minutes.

See, as far as I can tell there's no way to set up ROUTING in the GUI, but this fact is cleverly hidden by the Access and NAT screens.

Geez.

Philo

Philo
Monday, December 22, 2003

Do you mean drop to the command line on a PIX firewall? How do you do this? We can only manager our PIX501 through the stupid Java GUI (That only works on MS Java Virtual Machine - the SUN Machine crashes it).

ChrisO
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

'tis been a while since I configured one, but just like a Cisco router, it can be configured via either a LAN connection or through a serial port.

Somebody knows who built the PIX before Cisco bought the company?

Frederic Faure
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Wait I just tried TELNET. I never knew that I could do that.

Is it secure? Because normally we have to go to https://<PIX501IPADDRESS> but in telnet i just open <PIX501IPADDRESS>. so is it less secure using a non HTTPS connection? I assume because I am connecting to it from the internal interface it isn't an issue anyway.

ChrisO
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Telneting in is a really bad idea.  You might as well not use it as a firewall...  IOS supports SSH1.  You should at least use that...

christopher baus (www.baus.net)
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Considering most books are written from a CLI point of view, why the hell would you use any GUI with any cisco gear?

99% of tasks on ciscos aren't hard, don't know the option, type ? and get a list....

fw
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

"Considering most books are written from a CLI point of view"

That's what got me into the command line in the first place and yeah, once there it was cake to get things done.

Philo

Philo
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

I find that for opening a port on the firewall, and directing it to an internal server, the GUI is a lot faster. Especially since this is a task I do every three or four months. The CLI may be more usable on a day-to-day basis, but the GUI is a lot more learnable, at least for simple things like this.

dmooney
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

The thing that amuses me about router and firewall CLI command syntax is how it pretends to be a natural language parser (display route table, add route nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn blah gateway filter blah metric blah, allow SMTP port blah blah), and yet if you drop an element or mistype the parser comes back with something like ? or 'unrecognised command'.

Simon Lucy
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Well, in the case of IOS in general, not sure what to type, say you wanted to enable a routing protocol (lets hope nobody actually does this), while in the config section, type router then ? and you get a list of protocols, not sure what's next in the syntax? type ? and get a list.

fw
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

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