$ /bin/cormier --tagline

Update: FibreOP is now called Fibe.

If you are searching for a solution to remove the Actiontel Router provided by Bell and replace it with another device.

In my case, a Cisco ASA 5505, for the ASA 5505 is important to have the Security Plus license, as this license is required to use trunking. This should be possible on other brands of network devices, provided you can make the necessary configuration changes.

Warning: Before you begin, be warned that if you need to call in technicians in to troubleshoot, they will unlikely troubleshoot any problem that doesn’t involve their hardware, and you may incur a fee for the call. If you do run into line issues, etc, you can place the Actiontel Router back into your network for the duration of the call.

What you will need:

• Cisco ASA 5505 Firewall with Security Plus License or similar device that can use VLANs in the 30-35 range, some older devices have limits.
• Bell FibreOP connection
• Alcatel-Lucent modem
• MAC Address of Actiontel WAN Port
• Knowledge of Cisco ASA or other device

What are we attempting? To remove the Actiontel Router and have a Cisco ASA 5505 firewall host our leased RFC1483 DHCP IP address on the outside interface.

To accomplish this we will have to configure the Cisco ASA to use specific VLANs and MAC addresses, so it can communicate with the Alcatel-Lucent modem. This task requires networking knowledge and every specific knowledge about Cisco ASA devices or whatever device you have at your disposal. If you don’t understand this article, please do so before making any changes, as you could render your connection inoperable.

This is not meant to be a guide, just a post about how you can replace the Actiontel router with a Cisco ASA device, nothing more.

If you ever have to permanently remove a switch from a Dell switch stack, here are the steps.

A quick show switch stack-ports will display the ports configured for stacking or dedicated stacking ports depend on the switch model.

console#show switch stack-ports

                 Configured  Running
                   Stack      Stack      Link       Link
   Interface       Mode       Mode       Status     Speed (Gb/s)
---------------- ---------- ---------- ------------ ------------
Te1/2/1          Stack      Stack      Link Up      16
Te1/2/2          Stack      Stack      Link Up      16
Te2/2/1          Stack      Stack      Link Up      16
Te2/2/2          Stack      Stack      Link Up      16

Until you have a hardware malfunction and need to restore that data to another machine. I had the privilege of setting up a shiny new Ubuntu installation on a new hard drive, with my data trapped inside an ecryptfs file on another drive, which wasn’t a reliable drive, so I had to get as much of my data off soon. Ugh, what am I to do? The only thing I could do, find out how to decrypt and mount my old home directory. The first piece of information you are going to need is your ecryptfs mount pass-phrase, which you can recover, if you don’t remember. Here is how I recovered my pass-phrase. Notice, I have the partition with the encrypted directory mount at /mnt.

Extended ACLs are one of the fundamental access control features of IOS, knowing how they work and what they can do will make your job a lot easier. To start, extended ACLs match on more than just the source address, like standard ACLs. They can also be configured to match a range of layer 4 protocols like ICMP, OSPF, EIGRP, and etc. Other great thing about Extended ACLs is they can match on protocol fields, so you can match all packets with just the SYN flag set, or you could match a specific sequence number. Lets start by creating a simple extended access list, this access list will deny all inbound TCP port 80 traffic on the FastEthernet 0/0 interface.