Authentication Firewalls Security
31 January 2026

Eating the Elephant

Cisco ISE is a beast. As friendly as a Serbian bouncer, with a learning curve like the face of El Capitan, and as intuitive as shoe shopping for a fish. The official Cisco book on it: (https://www.ciscopress.com/store/ccnp-security-identity-management-sise-300-715-official-9780136677734) is over 1,000 pages long and each page is packed full of chewy techy goodness. Nonetheless, if you work in network security, ISE is probably something you should […]

Op-ed
2 November 2025

AI will kill us all, or at least our brains

I was going to do a post on using Vault to store API passwords but my labbing went in other directions and there’s a good course on Udemy for anyone that’s interested. However, I’ve been continuing with the API theme; using Python scripts to migrate an Cisco ASA to an on-box FDM managed Cisco FTD. If you migrate from a Cisco ASA to an FMC […]

Firewalls
25 August 2025

FortiGate API

I don’t really do any automation or DevOps in my job but in the interests of tinkering I have got as far as writing a couple of FortiGate API scripts so I thought I’d share the process and scripts here. The first script takes a backup of the FortiGate. It could be modified to encrypt the backup and then email it and I may well […]

General
12 April 2025

Cisco Modelling Labs

I have been running up various labs for work, generally to test a feature or investigate a certain issue, and have found my desire to do any discretionary tinkering has decreased somewhat. When I’m not doing that I find I have to learn something new or occasionally relearn something old. (I think I have now forgotten more than I know) To this end, I recently […]

Authentication Firewalls
13 November 2024

Palo Alto Admin authentication with Entra ID and Duo MFA

I wanted to try out Cisco Duo MFA using SAML and loyal readers of this blog will know in posts passim I set up authentication for a Palo Alto firewall administrator using SAML and ADFS so it seemed a natural progression to try this using Microsoft’s Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) with Cisco Duo. Microsoft Entra ID, which will act as the SAML primary authentication […]

Networking
27 July 2024

SONIC and Leaf and Spine

If that title makes you think of a pixelated hedgehog who has acquired two new sidekicks then you’re probably as old as me. However, SONIC is an open source networking operating system originally developed by Microsoft and its command line will be familiar to anybody who has worked with Cisco. I used it to play with leaf and spine networking. This fine gentlemen provides a […]

Encryption Firewalls
21 July 2024

An Image Problem II

Cyberratings.org, a non-profit technical testing organisation, recently released a report on eight NGFW firewalls. Seven of the vendors’ products tested received a recommended rating and one, Cisco, received a caution for their Firepower Threat Defense product . CyberRatings Announces Enterprise Firewall Test Results – CyberRatings The full report is behind a paywall but more insight is provided here: https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/analysis/ciscos-enterprise-firewall-receives-caution-rating-from-cyberratings/2024/06 I happened on this through an […]

Cloud
13 June 2024

Palo Cloud Event

The cloud in question was literal as I recently attended a SASE event at Palo Alto’s London offices which are in the cloud(s). Loyal readers will remember my picture of the view from Fortinet’s London office but Palo’s office is even higher. I have a smart phone which could have probably filtered, cropped and improved the quality of these images but needless to say I […]

Firewalls
4 May 2024

An Image Problem

They say write about what you know. Even if what you know about is reimaging Cisco firewalls? They probably didn’t mean write about that but never mind we’ll press on and not hold our breaths for the movie to come out. For reasons I won’t go into I recently had to re-image a Cisco FMC 1600 and two 3100 series FTDs. My main takeaway from […]

Op-ed
14 April 2024

What do those three dots do?

I have suppressed the urge to write an ‘is it just me?’ piece for some time now. However, what’s the point of having a barely-read blog if you can’t indulge yourself once in a while? When did GUIs stop being practical portals to the functions you need and become abstruse hieroglyph-strewn gateways? Do GUI designers hark back to happy days playing D&D where a treasure […]