How to download ASDM from ASA5505 and install it

by Cyrus Lok on Saturday, April 3, 2010 at 10:32am

The title is weird right? I felt that too… It has a CD but no ASDM installer at least I cannot find it (maybe I am stupid or something but whatever…) not all things inside the CD are windows application file, the cisco vpn client is a zip file in executable format that’s the only thing which I have clicked and run.

There are manuals in pdf format and other files with binary format which windows cannot execute them, some even have pkg format which I think should be for the box instead of my laptop.

The getting started guide is actually not very informative in my opinion only perhaps I am just impatient to read the starter guide from back to back, but several pictures only showed me how to connect wires…-_-”

There are a lot of manual in the CD of course… Well I only browsed through them… darn.. shouldn’t Cisco come out a flash demo video to show new users how to use their product at start up?

Ok. First connect straight through cable to your pc or connect to a switch and from that switch to my pc. I did an ipconfig/all these are the information from that ASA pre-configured dhcp server.

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-0A-E4-FC-04-FA
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Friday, April 02, 2010 6:56:49 PM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Friday, April 02, 2010 7:56:49 PM

Again, Cisco product is unlike those home user edition Cisco linksys router, this box is not designed for home user to “play”, so user has to do “more work” to go into it’s sweet ASA ASDM.

ASA5505 is running on FOS version 7.2, the command line is slightly different from IOS command. Knowing some commands in IOS helps to set up the ASA5505, remember Cisco ISR also has a SDM version 2.5? To launch the SDM I need to create a privilege 15 account and enable ip http server and/or ip http secure server.

For ASA’s case it is the same. However by default ASA supports https tcp 443.

Here how it goes:
I have consoled into the ASA5505 box.

Tserver#asa-1
Trying ASA-1 (1.1.1.1, 2005)… Open

ciscoasa>

ciscoasa> en
Password:
ciscoasa#

There is no password by default, so just press enter and you can pass into privilege exec mode.

ciscoasa# conf t
ciscoasa(config)#

Create a privilege level 15 user account. I used a lot of “?” to find out lol… Never be ashamed to use OS help 😉 Also do not be ashamed to ask around if I am stucked… :p

ciscoasa(config)# username cyrus password cisco privilege 15

Enable http server so that I can launch my ASDM:

ciscoasa(config)# http server enable ?

configure mode commands/options:
<1-65535> The management server’s SSL listening port. TCP port 443 is the
default.

I can just press enter after http server enable command this will use the default tcp 443 or I can specify the port I want my browser to syn to.

Open up the browser and type https://192.168.1.1/admin

A authentication dialog will pop up, enter the user account created.

Finally I hope this has been informative for you and I would like to thank you for reading (Jeremy Cioara’s closing sentence for every video, dun sue me Jeremy! I am one of your fan!!! )