Open ports on a cisco PIX 501

"Johhny" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...

Thanks, I'll try to do with it. I hate those cisco products, they are sooo hard to configure :) I would like a graphical interface to configure it. I heard it is possible to have one, but I didn't understand how to configure it though...

There is indeed a graphics interface for the PIX 501; if I recall properly it comes pre-installed on new 501s. You can find the documentaton at

I would, though, issue two cautions:

1) There are parts of the PDM that are not intuitive, and for which really the only way to make sense of them is to understand how the underlying feature works at the command line level. This is particularily the case for the task you were asking about, of configuring port forwarding.

2) If you encounter questions or difficulties with your PIX configuration and ask in newsgroups about how to configure something or what something means, then in practice posters are only occasionally willing to write down the entire sequence of menu selections, description of which field to use, which drop box value, and so on.

Thus, if you think you might be asking for assistance on the newsgroups, you should take the time to at least learn how to enter commands at the command line, and how to list the current configuration in order to post it, and you should expect that the answers will be in command-line configuration format.

I am not saying "Don't use the GUI": I'm saying that historically posters are seldom willing to give assistance in terms of how you would achieve the desired effect with the GUI, so you need enough about the CLI to be able to converse with them.

Sorry, but talking about GUI's takes too long! If I can give two lines of text commands that will solve the problem, then I'm not often going to be willing to describe the 15 step process to get the GUI to do the same thing.

By the way, for future information: most PIX questions go to comp.dcom.sys.cisco rather than comp.security.firewalls . There is a fair bit of overlap of skills and concepts between the PIX OS ("Finesse") and Cisco's IOS (for their switches and routers), so you have a much wider pool of qualified people to draw upon in comp.dcom.sys.cisco than in comp.security.firewalls .

Sure, sure, thanks for your anwser. At home I have a netgear firewall, and it is so easy to configure ports, I just have to enter port number, and the IP address it has to be redirected to, and click on "apply" ;) With cisco all is so hard.

I know how to enter commands in the term, but I just try to figure out what is the exact command to use... Because if I cannot configure our firewall, then our network is not really secure. CISCO likes hard configuration stuff because then people HAVE to buy their configuration lessons ;)

Am Fri, 20 Jan 2006 08:24:32 +0100 schrieb Julien Pham:

No, people just have to read the documentation.

Wolfgang

That's like saying that just because you've studied what each of the "C" programming language constructs do individually, that you should not have any problem understanding any C program.

Cisco's PIX Configuration Guides deal only with the most common scenarios and skip talking about any of the more complex options.

Cisco's PIX Command References list the allowed syntaxes, and have short examples for -most- of the options -- but the PIX Command References do not attempt to describe the *interaction* between all the various configuration possibilities.