Cisco 871 Integrated Services Router - router ( CISCO871-K9 ) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)NOTE: This is review is also in the context of setting up a CCSP/CCNP lab.
Granted in a production environment, the plethora of integrated security features are nice, and if you have fewer than 20 systems on your network, then this little guy is exactly what you need. For a branch-office, its inline security design is ideal. Additonally it supports up to 5VPN tunnels, so admins should be able do whatever tasks are needed. However, if you plan on using this for a DMZ, I'd recommend you reconsider. This only has 128MB of DRAM, and isn't the fastest CPU either, so you -will- have latency on a heavily accessed webserver. If its an extranet for some business partners, I'm sure you can get away it, but this will NOT meet your needs for consumer traffic destined for eCommerce or email relay servers for large corporations.
As far as setting up your own Cisco lab goes, this is by far the cheapest unit to support all the IOS features that must be mastered for CCNP's ISCW, and CCSP's SND and SNRS exams. Specifically:
-CBAC
-APPFW
-DES/3DES IPSec VPN [primarly for site-to-site]
-EZ VPN
-IPS
-WebVPN
-SDM
-AAA
Additionally, it can be configured to interoperate w/ a Micro$oft CA; another plus as far as self-training goes. Not -that- common in Corporate America; however if you plan on deploying smart cards to a highly mobile IT team, it can be useful to know how to do this.
NOTE: For the tests I used IOS 12.4(9), since the exams specificaly as you about attack-drop.sdf, 128.sdf, and 256.sdf. In newer versions of the IOS, they now use v5.x of the signature files, which is completely different format and no longer uses the predefined SDF files.

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