Summary

The Administration and Monitoring divisions of the VPN Configuration Manager supply the administrator with the functionality required to maintain, manage, and troubleshoot the Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator.

The Administration division enables you to perform support functions that pertain to the overall housekeeping and maintenance of the VPN Concentrator. Specifically, you can view and log out remote access, LAN-to-LAN, and management sessions. In addition, you can upgrade the concentrator's software, as well as that of the hardware and software clients. The software clients receive a notification containing the link to the HTML URL address; whereas hardware clients attempt to perform an auto update by using the TFTP URL address specified in the concentrator's notification. An additional administration function is to reboot the system. In this menu, you can reboot or shut down the system instantly or at a specific time, while also giving the option to save the configuration, not save it, or ignore it and return to factory defaults.

To limit access to the concentrator, the Administration Access Rights menus enable you to change the five defined administrators and their access privileges. Also in the Access Rights menus, you can define ACLs to limit access to the concentrator based upon an IP address or network. Finally, you can also offload the responsibilities of access rights to an AAA server by using the TACACS+ protocol.

The VPN Concentrator maintains several files in its Flash memory. The active configuration is one of these files that is backed up as a CONFIG.BAK file every time you click on the save icon. In cases where you want to restore that previous configuration, you can swap the configuration file in the File Management section of the navigation pane.

The Monitoring menus enable the user to view a multitude of statistics for all the function subcomponents of the VPN Concentrator. For instance, you can view the concentrator's routing table, in addition to its filterable event log. You can also look at the live event log that is refreshed every 5 seconds.

The Monitoring division supplies you with a convenient System Status screen, in which you can see general statistics, such as software versions, uptime, memory status, as well as a graphical representation of the front and back panel that can be used as hyperlinks to common troubleshooting statistics. Additionally, this division similar to the Administration division lets you view sessions, but this page allows you to view the particular protocols, encryption, and top 10 sessions. Finally, you are also provided with a Statistics section in which you can view statistics on every process and protocol running on the concentrator. In these menus, you can also explore the MIB-II statistics for those protocols and interfaces that can be managed by SNMP management stations.