Working in a datacenter, it is often required to apply the same intereface configuration on many ports; Cisco has an embedded useful command to do it: the smartports macros.

Smartports macros provide a convenient way to save and share common configurations. You can use Smartports macros to enable features and settings based on the location of a switch in the network and for mass configuration deployments across the network.

Each Smartports macro is a set of CLI commands that you define. Smartports macros do not contain new CLI commands; they are simply a group of existing CLI commands.

When you apply a Smartports macro on an interface, the CLI commands within the macro are configured on the interface. When the macro is applied to an interface, the existing interface configurations are not lost. The new commands are added to the interface and are saved in the running configuration file.

On March 3 2010, the The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) has published three important vulnerability advisories:

• Cisco Digital Media Player Remote Display Unauthorized Content Injection Vulnerability
• Cisco Digital Media Manager Vulerabilities
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager Denial of Service Vulnerabilities

Cisco Digital Media Player Remote Display Unauthorized Content Injection Vulnerability
A vulnerability exists in the Cisco Digital Media Player that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to inject video or data content into a remote display.

Vulnerable Products
Cisco Digital Media Player versions earlier than 5.2 are affected by this vulnerability.

On October 8, 2009 Cisco announced the winners of its “Think Inside the Box” Developer Contest. Launched on Dicember 2008, the competition challenged application developers around the world to develop applications that run on the Cisco® Application Extension Platform (AXP), which resides on the popular Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR).

The winning teams were determined by a panel of seven industry experts who selected the following applications as the most innovative, implementable and relevant to businesses. More than 100 qualified teams from 75 countries entered the competition. The finalists demonstrated the business relevance of the AXP in solving real-world problems, in areas of unified communications, security, advertising, cloud architectures and energy management.

Recently, the The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) has published four important vulnerability advisories.

Multiple Vulnerabilities in Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances
Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances are affected by the following vulnerabilities:

• TCP Connection Exhaustion Denial of Service Vulnerability
• Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Inspection Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
• Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP) Inspection Denial of Service Vulnerability
• WebVPN Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) Denial of Service Vulnerability
• Crafted TCP Segment Denial of Service Vulnerability
• Crafted Internet Key Exchange (IKE) Message Denial of Service Vulnerability
• NT LAN Manager version 1 (NTLMv1) Authentication Bypass Vulnerability

These vulnerabilities are not interdependent; a release that is affected by one vulnerability is not necessarily affected by the others. There are workarounds for some of the vulnerabilities disclosed in this advisory.

FORTUNE’s annual “Best Companies to Work For” list is out, and Cisco has been placed in the top 25 (No. 16 overall and No. 4 for large-sized companies) for the fifth consecutive year.

Cisco has been a part of this list ever year since its inception in 1998—our unique culture of transparency and openness continues to drive these types of recognitions.

What makes Cisco a great place to work?

“We are trusted to do our jobs.  We go through a gauntlet of interviews to get a job at Cisco.  Sure, we have to the appropriate educational background and/or work experiences, but we also have to be a cultural fit into the company and the teams that we’ll be working with.  What is Cisco’s culture?  I work hard and trust my colleagues to work hard…I haven’t been let down.  I work with creative, innovative professionals and we all know that a collaborative work environment creates a better product.  It is as simple as “two heads are better than one.”.

Recently, the The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) has published three important vulnerability advisories.

Multiple Vulnerabilities in Cisco Unified MeetingPlace
Multiple vulnerabilities exist in Cisco Unified MeetingPlace. This security advisory outlines the details of these vulnerabilities:

• Insufficient validation of SQL commands
• Unauthorized account creation
• User and password enumeration in Cisco MeetingTime
• Privilege escalation in Cisco MeetingTime

Cisco Systems wants to put a router on every communications satellite.

The networking giant has already sent the first one into space.
The company announced that the router has successfully completed initial in-orbit tests, after being launched Nov. 23 aboard the Intelsat 14 communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles above the Earth.

The move is one small step in a bold, new Cisco initiative dubbed Internet Routing in Space (IRIS), which company executives say extends the same Internet protocol-based (IP) technology used to build the World Wide Web into the heavens. The long-term goal, they say, is to route voice, data and video traffic between satellites over a single IP network in ways that are more efficient, flexible and cost effective than is possible over today’s fragmented satellite communications networks.

In a large/critical network, it is fundamental backup the Cisco configuration for two reasons:

• Rollback configuration
• Restore configuration in case of a broken router

There are two ways to backup: manually (using write command each time that you would save running configuration) or automatically (using software like Ciscoworks, HP OpenView, … ).

In this tutorial, I would explain a different method to backup configuration: the archive command.

Introduced into Cisco IOS Release 12.3(4)T, the archive command permits to save a copy of the current running configuration to different path: ftp, http, https, rcp, scp, tftp servers. Moreover the archive command has other features, but in this article I would use only two of these:

• time-period: it sets the time increment for automatically saving an archive file of the current running configuration in the Cisco IOS configuration archive.
• write-memory: it enable automatic backup generation during write memory; for instance, when I use the ‘write’ command the archive command will be invoked automatically.

The The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) has published one important vulnerability advisory:  Multiple Cisco WebEx WRF Player Vulnerabilities.

Multiple buffer overflow vulnerabilities exist in the Cisco WebEx Recording Format (WRF) Player. In some cases, exploitation of the vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the system of a targeted user.

The Cisco WebEx WRF Player is an application that is used to play back WebEx meeting recordings that have been recorded on the computer of an on-line meeting attendee. The WRF Player can be automatically installed when the user accesses a WRF file that is hosted on a WebEx server. The WRF Player can also be manually installed for offline playback after downloading the application from www.webex.com.

Yesterday, Cisco marks its 25th anniversary with a call to community service. Chairman and CEO John Chambers challenged every Cisco employee to volunteer four hours of service in his or her local community. The networking leader’s goal is an aggregate contribution of 200,000 employee volunteer hours, which equates to approximately 25 years worth of service to the global community.

Cisco was founded on December 10, 1984 by husband and wife Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, two former Stanford University computer scientists whose efforts to enable email between computers on different networks led to the invention of the first multiprotocol router. This seminal breakthrough played a major role in fueling the growth of the Internet. 

Chambers says “In the coming quarter century, the role of the network will become even more important in driving growth, innovation, and productivity in industries such as healthcare, education and energy.  Looking ahead, Cisco is positioned to lead the evolution of the network to enable a ‘connected future’ which is increasingly collaborative, video-driven, personalized, and mobile.”.