Day: 7 July 2004

Mini Pix

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After some consideration I went out and bought a Cisco Pix 501e. You may be wondering why in the world a person needs one of those. Need may not be the word, but I do have uses for it. In the past 24 hours I have learned more about IKE tunnels than I had in the past 12 months. Allot of what I want it for is work related, but I doubt they will pay for it so I got one.

I want to prove (i know it can be done, but me doing it and having someone say it can be done are two different things) that I can setup a static VPN tunnel securely and allow a VOIP phone to connect to our office. I want to be able to lock down the connection so only the voice traffic we want can go over the VPN. It will work since to my office pix, it is just connecting to another office with a pix. The 501 is exactly the same as the larger 515 but you can only do less. The config and the PDM is all the same.

It is very cool. The only problem I am having is that I cannot initiate a VPN client connection through my pix to another pix somewhere else. We have this problem at work, and I have not been able to find a fix for it. I need to call Cisco about it. It is a pain, but not a show stopper.

I showed jayson what we can do with the personal Pix and he wants one, but he just got a big screen tv so he is not spending anything for a while.

Firefox Vs. Mozilla Vs. I.E.

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I downloaded Mozilla’s Firefox 0.91 last night for my Mac. To me it didn’t seem that much different from Mozilla 1.7. Not sure what advanced features they were touting but it just looked like a stand alone version of Mozilla to me. It had better import / export of bookmarks. Other than that, not sure what the big deal is. I will probably start using it, but only because I don’t need or want the newsreader or email client that comes with mozilla.

I find it funny that the government is telling people that Mozilla is more secure than IE. It probably isn’t. it is just less used, so less people using something equals less people trying to exploit it. I still think mozilla is a better browser. We have been pushing mozilla as a browser in my company for over a year. We love it. This past attack on IE reinforces my decision to go with Mozilla. Like I said it probably is not more secure, but in reality it will be attacked less, since fewer people use it. I think that theory is holding up.