Upon troubleshooting several of the WSA and SMA issues, I found out that Cisco has implemented a couple of neat “hidden commands”. Of course these won’t be shown when you tab the command, so please use them wisely.
I’ll update this list when I discovered another.
Alert_timeout
This command is used to alter the time before an alert is sent when a WSA cannot be reached by the SMA. By default, this is set to 360 minutes, but can be altered.
SMA > reportingconfig
Reporting service status: Centralized Email Reporting is disabled.
Reporting service status: Centralized Web Reporting is enabled. (Show usernames in reports.)
Choose the operation you want to perform:
– SETUP – Enable Centralized Reporting for this management appliance.
– DOMAIN – Configure domain report settings.
[]> alert_timeout
An alert will be sent if reporting data has not been fetched
from an appliance after 360 minutes.
Would you like timeout alerts to be enabled? [Y]>
After how many minutes should an alert be sent?
[360]>
Choose the operation you want to perform:
– SETUP – Enable Centralized Reporting for this management appliance.
– DOMAIN – Configure domain report settings.
You want to alter these settings if you didn’t (or couldn’t) set up proper monitoring (so you will get an alert when one of your WSA’s stopped responding), or if your WSA is down for more than 6 hours (for example, if your company only works 8 hours a day and you decide to shut the box down for the remaining hours to save on energy).
You can alter the alert timeout setting in our SMA under reportingconfig as you can see in the command section above.
The minimum value is 20 minutes and there is no maximum value.
Ipcheck
WSA/SMA> ipcheck
This command will display all of the information about the WSA or SMA. Here you can find:
- Ipcheck revision
- Date
- Model
- Platform
- Version
- Build date
- Install date
- Burn-in date
- Serial no.
- Bios version
- RAID version
- RAID status
- RAID Type
- RAID Chunk
- BMC Version
- Misc Disk information
- RAM information
- NIC information
- PS information
- Information about keys.
You should use this command if you need to get a quick overview of the status of your device. For example, this is the only place I found information about the power supply. It also contains the mac addresses of all interfaces, so you don’t have to detail each interface.
Most of the information can be found using the regular commands. However, it does include data that isn’t shown when you use them. Most of this information is currently implemented in the command:
WSA/SMA> version
Localhosts
In some cases, you need to add an A-record. Like when you’re unable to use your companies DNS and you have split DNS configured. You can configure this by using the localhost command.
WSA> dnsconfig
Currently using the local DNS cache servers:
1. Priority: 0 8.8.8.8 Choose the operation you want to perform:
– NEW – Add a new server.
– EDIT – Edit a server.
– DELETE – Remove a server.
– SETUP – Configure general settings.
[]> localhosts
Local IP to Host mappings:
Choose the operation you want to perform:
– NEW – Add new local IP to host mapping.
– DELETE – Delete an existing mapping.
[]>new
Enter the IP address of the host you are adding.
[]> <IP>
Enter the canonical host name and any additional aliases (separate values with
spaces)
[]> <hostname>
Local IP to Host mappings:
1. <IP> <hostname>
Choose the operation you want to perform:
– NEW – Add new local IP to host mapping.
– DELETE – Delete an existing mapping.
[]>
So basically, this is equal to the host file on any other system. Do not forget to commit the data at the end, as this is mandatory to activate the configuration.