I may have reinvented the wheel with this but I’ve started to write a Perl module for interacting with the Cisco FMC API using Perl. I say I may have reinvented the wheel because I didn’t check to see if someone else had already done this. I’ve published my module on GitHub. At the time of writing this, the module is at version 0.01. And as per the README right now
Today I was auditing a firewall rule set on a Cisco ASA firewall. The firewall has around 399 ACLs (Access Control Lists) comprising of 7272 ACEs (Access Control Entries). Quite a task! Unfortunately I didn’t have any tools to hand such as Cisco Security Manager or something like FirePac to audit the rules and give me some suggestions. Stage 1 was to visually look at the ACLs and spot the obvious
So you can’t automate the entire process unfortunately. You’re still going to need to pull a late night and get your hands dirty… Recently I was tasked with swapping out 4 old Cisco 10/100Mb switches with new 10/100/1000Mb switches. The old switches were a combination of Cisco 3560, 2950 and 3548 series. The old switches also had some old configurations that needed to be updated and the interface configurations weren’t consistent. The
Short answer: Yes. Maybe not a programmer in the sense that you need to be proficient in C++, .NET, assembler, know UML etc but having some general programming knowledge is very useful. In my opinion and experience the most important programming skill to have is a fairly in-depth knowledge of a scripting language. Be that shell, Perl, Powershell or even batch scripts. A week doesn’t go by where I don’t write a