Basic Configuration Tutorial For the Cisco Asa 5510 Firewall

Continuing our series of articles about Cisco Asa 5500 firewalls, I'm contribution you here a basic configuration tutorial for the Cisco Asa 5510 security appliance. This gadget is the second model in the 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 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.

Next we will see a easy Internet access scenario which will help us understand the basic steps needed to setup an Asa 5510. Assume that we are assigned a static social 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 associated on the face (towards the Isp), and Ethernet0/1 will be associated to the Inside Lan switch.

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The firewall will be configured to furnish Ip addresses dynamically (using Dhcp) to the internal hosts. All outbound transportation (from inside to outside) will be translated using Port Address Translation (Pat) on the face social 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 anyone 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 social face 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 face 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 face 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 starting for making the appliance operational. There are many more configuration features that you need to implement to growth the security of your network, such as Static and Dynamic Nat, access control Lists to control traffic flow, Dmz zones, Vpn etc.

Visit my website in my reserved supply box below for more facts about Cisco products and solutions. You can also learn how to configure any Cisco Asa 5500 Firewall Here (applicable for All Asa models running software versions 7.x and 8.x).

Basic Configuration Tutorial For the Cisco Asa 5510 Firewall

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