contivity takes a bow...

the nortel contivity firewall was reaching end of life, at least my life, so i seized the opportunity to introduce another cisco system to the community; the ASA-5520...

the 5520 naturally had its roots in pix technology, so i ordered it and also ordered a book... the book that was available was geared towards the 5520 but it was mostly pix with a few hints about the new (for us) firewall...

i was a little sad to see contivity go...  she had been a good box and over the years i had become accustomed to it, pretty good at its filtering features actually, but she had had her day and i always wanted more cisco wherever i could get it...remember, i was always fighting the nortel monster...

the 5520 took about a half a day to implement but she came around... the front end was a lot like what SDM is now...  not awfully friendly but serviceable... the feature set was extensive and whereas the VPN of the contivity was pretty straight forward, 5520 was a little more complicated... my long term cisco hopes were slowly, very slowly, coming to fruition...

the internet is slow today...

my 3614 was purring along smoothly, i was tasked with making it work nice with our nortel contivity firewall, and a web filter called bess...  bess was a dog, a real dog for the filter company owner...  bess was loyal, faithful and true and she didn't allow our users to go to unsavory sites any longer... of course her filtering caused processing overhead... and the contivity (a great firewall, but i didn't like the fruit inspired filtering icons) also took its toll on performance... toss in dns, dhcp and possibly a packet filter...  "geez the internet seems slow today"...  "seems fine to me"...  "it was faster yesterday"... the empirical evidence was overwhelming and always based on feelings... "it just feels slow is all"... "can you ping?"...  "yes, but what is that REALLY telling me?"... in a word, EVERYTHING...

packet internet groper has a way of restoring your sanity by way of proving network connectivty... but feelings are more reliable as far as management is concerned...  "the internet just doesn't seem right to day"...  here's a picture; try squeezing a ton of users through a garden hose at the same time... what do you get? an embittered user community and a busy help desk phone...  there was this thing once called a cache engine... stick it in the router and it will save url's for visited websites on our side of the fire wall and distribute them from inside the network...  nice idea...  didn't work very well..

what does work?  more frigging bandwidth... you've got 100 M behind the firewall  for hosts, now let's shove them through a five meg pipe to the isp...

how do you feel about your network today?