Cisco ASA5505

[quanttrade99z]

Dear ALL,

I am in the market for a wired router to support mission-critical day trading.

After asking for advice here, I have pretty much decided to purchase the Cisco ASA5505-SEC-BUN-K9.

I'm also planning on getting (either at start or a couple weeks after) the:
ISP failover add-on.

Does anyone have any experience with this product? Any recommendations on best place to buy it from?

I will be using it to support a small home/office network. I run my daytrading business on this network, no am very sensitive to internet outages.
My networking skills are very poor, so am hoping setup will be easy... or at least that the Cisco support people can do it for me.

Interested in general comments. Also, in particular, does the ISP fail over feature work well?

Thank you all
quanttrade99z

 

[Brandon]

I use an ASA 5505 in my home as we speak, and I love it. I also use two 5510's and four 5520's at work on a bi-weekly basis depending on network changes.

Something to keep in mind, is that it may or may not be an easy process to setup. It does offer a GUI, which will help in a few ways, but it may also hinder you in others as some things aren't exactly clear. To this day, I still tend to use both the command line and GUI as I often can't find what I'm looking for in the GUI.

One thing I would keep in mind, is that this device won't work out of the box. It will require anywhere from several hours, to several days of setup, depending on how good you are with google. I would do a little research, there are quite a few easy setup walkthrough guides for these devices these days. A lot of this depends on your ISP's setup as well.

From the sound of it, you're not trying to connect in, and you're not trying to connect via VPN, so the setup should be fairly simple. Normally this just means setting the outside interface to DHCP, inside to STATIC (Something like 192.168.1.1 for the gateway), then adding an access rule allowing all traffic to pass from inside to out.

If you're using it as a DHCP server as well, then you will need to set up a DHCP pool, with something like 192.168.1.10-200 Gateway 192.168.1.1 DNS 4.2.2.2 4.2.2.3 and so on. The GUI has a decent setup wizzard for this, though you may have to reset it to defaults a few times. I would suggest doing this in the off hours (When you're not trading).

Once it is set up, you honestly won't have to touch it at all, my personal ASA has an uptime of 316 days currently, making it the longest running device I've owned thus far. If you do decide to use more of it's features, they're fairly easy to enable after the first setup is done.

As for the dual WAN, it's a bit more complicated, the device also supports a failover, allowing two to be ran at the same time in the very rare chance one dies.

As for buying them, I really can't say. I picked mine up from newegg on the cheap side. It's something you really have to shop for. If you upgrade licences, you'll have to find other retailers. I think CDW offers licence upgrades online, but I'm not 100% sure.

Hope this helps.

 

[dgb]

Cisco ASA5505-SEC-BUN-K9

My networking skills are very poor

ahhh no.

pick up (2) cisco rv082 routers. hire a basic network tech(you trust, if possible) to update the firmware, configure the router, then upload the same exact settings to the second "backup" router. set "backup" router in closet until hardware doomsday comes. if you're dealing with big scrilla, request the network tech come by every 3-6 months to check for issues &/or new firmware updates. call it a day.

 

[bendsley]

ahhh no.

pick up (2) cisco rv082 routers. hire a basic network tech(you trust, if possible) to update the firmware, configure the router, then upload the same exact settings to the second "backup" router. set "backup" router in closet until hardware doomsday comes. if you're dealing with big scrilla, request the network tech come by every 3-6 months to check for issues &/or new firmware updates. call it a day.

I'm going to have to agree here. Do not purchase the ASA5505 if you don't know what you're doing. You will be more frustrated than when you started looking for something.