1999-03-17-16:12:14 Pavlichek, Doris (GEIS, GE Capital Consulting):
> One tries to make a short point on this list and one gets a nasty little
> jab. Cute. And unnecessary.
I'm sorry; I try to write in a casual and relaxed tone; sometimes jokes come
across as being viciously nasty without my intending it. This was such a case.
(Also I do sometimes come out thoroughly viciously nasty, deliberately ---
this was Not my intent in the preceeding note).
> My point was that so that you can be "dumb during a crisis" you can prepare
> ahead of time. You don't *have* to use a tftp server (although I admit I
> lost track of the original thread - my profuse apologies). You can also
> keep copies of your configs in encrypted files.
>
> Having been in a situation where we used cold spares and had complex
> configs, I can attest to the fact that our downtime wasn't that long. And
> we did have a trusted mgmt LAN. But we weren't using tftp at that point.
If possible, I'd like to rig things so that boxes for which you are sparing
in cold stock require no config at all.
If you keep your switches _Really_ really dumb, you can lock the smarts into
router config, and _it_ can be hot-spared with e.g. Cisco's HSRP.
Anywhere you have boxes that want to store configuration for reloading over
the net, you surely do want a trusted management LAN. And the conflicting
requirements of a trusted management LAN, set up so cold-spare switches can
download their complex configs quickly and easily in a crisis, together with
an urgent need for strong security barriers between e.g. that mgmt lan and the
internet, makes my case: that multiple VLANs on one switch aren't an appealing
security barrier implementation.
-Bennett
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