Why Cisco Engineers Make Craploads O' Cash

There are a lot of fail safes and security measures in place to prevent people being virtually mugged by hackers and spammers alike. One of these devices, a Cisco ASA, is a commonly used product at most businesses to prevent the kid down the street with Linux bumper stickers on his car from hacking your accounts (which you use the same password for all, of course).

He's Waiting....

Now you all may be like "What is a Cisco ASA?" Essentially, it's a box that does the following:

Simple enough huh? Wrong....

Through my everyday travels as a nerd by trade. I come across requests to change this device regularly and due to recent changes to our network, it's been a bit more frequent. There are two ways to configure this device; Terminal, which is this: 

Or you can use Cisco's wonderfully-terrible graphic user tool, ASDM:

MUCH BETTER!

Here's the wonderful thing about ASDM, it rarely works the way it's supposed to. You have to filter through a labyrinth of  menus, drop-downs, and confusingly similarly named items to find what you need.
If you survive the minotaur, and actually find what you want, you generally are confronted with millions of specific entries made into the system, each incredibly important. Much like a stubborn three-year-old, these don't like when take things away from them.

Another wonderful thing about this the "backup" function actually doesn't work. At all. I made a mistake on reconfiguring ours, and by george did I pay for it. Restoring our "Backups" accomplished absolutely zilch. I was later told that was the incorrect way to back up the device, because "Backup Configuration" apparently means "Suck it Trebek" in Cisco-ese.

Now, If you find yourself huddled in a corner after screwing this thing up (which will happen, at least the screwing up part) you can always submit a ticket to the wonderful world of Cisco Engineers.

Typical Cisco Engineer

Now, as a rule, none of the Cisco engineers speak English as a first language; this adds to their mystique. Once connecting into your computer, they proceed to go into terminal and push your computer to the amount of text/second it's allow to display. In approximately 5 seconds they usually find the issue, and demonstrate a plethora of Cisco-specific code that you follow along with (but can't understand). This code is actually like it's own language, and most Engineers tattoo all the commands on themselves like that guy from Memento. Otherwise, without the painful memories, they may forget how to configure vpn tunnels.

Cisco has a lot on their websites in the form of learning materials and case scenarios on how to set these things up, but generally they just pour salt in the wound and show you how truly retarded you are.

Pretty much every Engineer or Cisco Savvy person I've talked to has said the following about ASDM

Don't you ever use this!

So, basically, you are left with this:

Gonna be a long night!

 Oh Boy....