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Showing posts from October, 2022

Cisco Cloud-scale Switching Innovations

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Cisco recently announced 800G capable switches focused on hyperscalers, financials, service providers, and other large organizations requiring high speeds and low latency. The 800G capable switches currently come in two flavors: the Nexus 9232E and the Cisco 8111.  Both are 1RU and powered by Cisco's Silicone One G100 ASIC (more on that below).  They support 32 QSFP-DD800 800G ports with the ability to break out to 2x400G or 8x100G offering even more port density from a compact 1RU platform.   What I think is really special about this launch surrounds the Cisco 8111.  While the Nexus 9232E supports running NX-OS; the Cisco 8111 supports third-party operating systems such as SONiC as well as IOS-XR.  This is a huge advantage for organizations who currently run white box switching solutions.  White box switches traditionally have high failure rates and suffer from poor technical support.  The Cisco 8100 series offers the world-class Cisco hardware quality with full Cisco TAC support
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Fix Cisco ISE Messaging Service

Cisco Identity Services Engine 2.6 introduced the concept of the ISE Messaging Service as an encrypted, lightweight protocol to replace syslog communication between the ISE nodes for logging purposes.  The ISE Messaging Services runs over TCP/8671.  In 2.6 Patch 2 and later, the Cisco ISE Messaging Service is enabled by default.   The overall implementation of the ISE Messaging Service has been buggy (but has gotten much better in recent versions) in both new ISE builds and upgrades.  One solution is simply to disable the ISE Messaging Service within Administration > System > Logging.  But then the ISE logging traffic isn't encrypted and the legacy syslog delivery method is not as efficient as the ISE Messaging Service so we will focus the rest of this article on how to identity and fix the ISE Messaging Service. Problem Identification Usually problems with the ISE Messaging Service involve a blank Live Logs page.  You know authentication is working as you have devices/users
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ClearPass MPSK per Device Type with Profiling

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Multiple Pre-Shared Key or MPSK helps solve for IOT or other endpoint device types that are not 802.1X capable.  The Aruba ClearPass default implementation of MPSK (the configuration created by the wizard) requires manually registering, enrolling, and managing individual PSK keys per endpoint using the ClearPass Guest dashboard.  While the most secure approach, excluding any sort of API based automation, this can obviously be a nightmare to manage and support due to the sheer number of PSKs.  This approach instead delivers a unique PSK per device type (printer, thermostat, etc.) so that each flavor of endpoint would have its own PSK.  If one PSK was compromised, then only those endpoints would need to be manually re-configured.  PSK rotation would also be limited to only those specific device types allowing rotation to take place slowly over several weeks rather than all devices at the same time on the SSID with a traditional single PSK; lessoning the burden on IT staff and minimizing
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Cisco Designated VIP 2023

I'm happy to announce that I have been recognized as a Cisco Community Designated VIP for 2023 for my assistance in the Cisco Secure Network Access Control community focusing on Identity Services Engine.  Be sure to check out all of the Cisco Community Designated VIPs .
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