How to build a permanent ASA Firewall at your home for Cisco Labs

Every network engineers need to practice and refresh their knowledge skill set to enhance the talent on designing, implementing, administering and troubleshooting various data networks. It will directly impact the remarkable progress of career development in the current job role. However, if a company has a reliable network infrastructure and standard architectural design, it will not be occurring network failures daily. So, how would you enhance the skills when there isn’t anything to troubleshoot or implement a new network. But you can do research and development to learn new technologies. The problem is you cannot use the company infrastructure all the time to practice a lab or implement a new network topology. On the other hand, often the company’s network runs continuously and it is critical to touch and do configuration during business hours. Thus, due to the risk, you have to wait until any network failure occurs to troubleshoot. Your boss may be dislike to upgrade the network devices.

Therefore, you stay in your company as a network administrator and doing nothing, just monitoring the infrastructure. Then your memory related to networking theories and kinds of stuff will be losing day by day. So, how to get rid and practice a lab scenario?

You have to buy network devices or hire a rack but those are more expensive and you have to consider about the maintenance cost as well. But we have the greatest solution to overcome this problem. Go through our article How to find the best GNS3 version to satisfy any network topology requirement and installed it on your machine. Then you will have routers, L2/L3 switches, firewalls, etc. emulators at home. Today we talk about ASA firewall implementation. Go through this article step by step and initiate the topology. Then save the configuration and GNS3 lab in your hard drive. Now you have an ASA firewall at home. Let’s jump into the configuration.

Prerequisites:

Install the GNS3 version which can satisfy your design requirement.
Attach the ASA firewall to GNS3.
Enable Microsoft loopback network adapter.
Install TFTP server

Network Topology

Methodology

Drag and drop the ASA firewall into GNS3 and connect the loopback adapter. For this lab, the TFTP server has installed in the physical computer where GNS3 installed. Copy the ‘asdm’ file to the TFTP folder location and open the TFTP server application.

Configuration

ASA# configure terminal

# interface Giga 0

# ip address 10.20.20.1 255.255.255.0

# nameif inside

# no shut

ASA# !copy asdm file into flash directory

# copy tftp://10.20.20.44/asdm-647.bin flash:

ASA# configure terminal

# asdm image flash:asdm-647.bin

# http server enable

# http 10.20.20.44 255.255.255.255 inside

# ! if you desire to set credentials, use below command.

# username abc password 123 privilege 15

Load the ASDM

Now you can load the Cisco ASDM through a web console. We have tested with Firefox. Open up your web browser and type https://10.20.20.1. Click on the ‘Install ASDM Launcher’ button to download the application. You can install the Cisco ASDM launcher and able to access the ASA security appliance from your desktop using SSL instead of using a web console. Please note, you need Java to install the ASDM launcher. Once you click on the ‘Install Java Web Start’ button, it will direct to a web page to download the suitable Java version.

When you finish the installation process, go to the desired folder to run the Cisco ASDM application. In our case, we have installed the ASDM launcher to the default location (C:\Program Files (x86)\Cisco Systems\ASDM). There you can see ‘asdm-launcher’ executable jar file. Double click to proceed.

Now you have to put the ASA firewall IP address in Device UP Address/Name field. So, we can see another advantage of using ASDM is we can run multiple security appliances. Provide a username and password to load the Cisco ASDM.

Make sure to save all the configuration and the GNS3 project on your computer. Once you need the ASA firewall, you can open up the GNS3 project folder and load the ASDM for further configuration, meaning now you have an ASA firewall at your home. If you have any doubts in this article or errors that occurred while installing the appliance, please don’t hesitate to comment below. We will try our best to answer all the quarries on time.