Some basic Cisco help needed by newbie...

Phibsboro

Hi,

I am entering into the very confusing world of Cisco firewalls and routers. My company is being asked by our (foreign) Head Office to implement a VPN. They are recommending a Cisco 5505 on our end. We are currently using Irish Broadband fixed wireless (i.e. their Breeze service).

I have two very basic questions :-

1. HQ are quite confused about what the breeze service is. Currently the connection from the breeze radio simply plugs straight into the NT Server and is set up as a standard TCP/IP network connection. They are more used to a DSL setup and are expecting to set the 5505 up with a username and password. I am telling them that the breeze service doesn't need that (its all set up in the radio as I understand it) and that all we need is to plug the network cable from the radio into the 5505. IS that right? Plug the Breeze network cable into the 5505 and the NT server into the 5505?

2. They are pushing for ISDN backup which would involve extra equipment. As I understand it this would dial directly into a backup system on their side and so is mainly to cover an ISP outage on their side. My gut feel is that the ISP on my side is much more likely to give trouble and so I'd rather have a backup for that. As I understand it, the 5505 is capable of having dual ISPs configured so I am hoping to get a standard 2mb Eircom DSL line set up. At €30 a month this is actually cheaper than the ISDN line rental. Is this feasible? Is it the right way to go?

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I am quite confused about the whole vpn/cisco world so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
C

monkey tennis

Phibsboro wrote:

Plug the Breeze network cable into the 5505 and the NT server into the 5505?

Yes (make sure IBB don't lock the connecting device down by MAC address). I believe ASAs have built-in switches, so you might be able to connect the rest of the LAN directly to it. OT, but I think connecting an NT box directly to the internet is mental.

Phibsboro wrote:

As I understand it, the 5505 is capable of having dual ISPs configured so I am hoping to get a standard 2mb Eircom DSL line set up. At €30 a month this is actually cheaper than the ISDN line rental. Is this feasible? Is it the right way to go?

I'm not familiar enough with the 5505 to know whether it can use 'dual ISPs' (i.e. failover), you might need a dedicated failover router for this - double check the specs to make sure.

Personally, I'd go with a backup DSL line - ISDN is really outdated, and I'd be surprised if the HQ are getting better value than an ADSL or (preferably) SDSL line. Again, I'm not familar with ASAs, but some VPN devices will let you set up failover VPNs, so this might be interesting to the HQ.