Getting 401 error - Cisco Firepower via HTTP/S on browsers or Postman.

[vbacon]

Good day,

I am having difficulty accessing the Firepower Threat Defense REST API web page while using the Cisco Any Connect VPN. I am using Linux Mint and the browsers I have tried are Brave, Chromium, and Firefox which all return a 401 Unauthorized code.

{"message":"Unauthorized","status_code":401}

The web page does not prompt for authentication details and does not allow me to proceed when using the following URLs:

- https://<ip>/api/objects/network-objects/
^^ the resource is actually network objects without the hyphen or I was unable to post this question.
- https://<ip>/doc/

When creating a Postman environment to access the device's API, I also get 401 codes and have tried using authentication details provided by the sandbox access details.

My question is, does anyone else have this issue when using the Linux platform? Is the sandbox browser support specific to any one browser? And finally, what could I do better to get access to this device using API calls if my requests are failing in Postman using provided credentials?

Thank you!

[Torbjørn · Accepted solution]

That response typically means that you are not authenticated/authorized. Can you provide some more information about the request(s) that are failing? Especially authentication wise.

See the following docs for information regarding using and authenticating to the FTD API:

• https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/firepower/ftd-api/guide/ftd-rest-api/ftd-api-general-process.html
• https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/firepower/ftd-api/guide/ftd-rest-api/auth-ftd-rest-api.html#task_D3DF4A67A0554CF587C0193906435E0F 

[bigevilbeard]

You can see more details if you go into the Postman console, to the footer to open the console. (In the Postman desktop app, use CMD +Option+C or Ctrl+Alt+C to open the Postman console in a new window.) Select view in console to inspect the request details in the console and find out more about what went wrong.

There was another thread on this here https://community.cisco.com/t5/devnet-sandbox/unable-to-logon-to-the-fdm-in-the-firepower-threat-defence/td-p/4462944 and 

HTH

[HawarKoyi]

I opened without any problem. When you connected into VPN, open AnyConnect ==> Info ==> Route Details, check that you have route 10.10.20.0/24 or try to ping 10.10.20.65. 

[vbacon]

After reviewing the provided articles and responses on accessing the FTD, I was able to access the resource via Postman by generating a token with a POST request and using the token to send my other requests.

As for the webGUI, I was trying to access specficially the /api/objects/network-objects (again, without the hyphen) and the /api/doc resouces. However, I never tried to access the FTD with just the IP address itself, which would have been more sensical to try from the beginning. When I entered the https://10.10.20.65/ yesterday, I was greeted by the login page and was able to inspect the device. Today, it states that the page is down for maintenance.

For those two resources I was attempting to access, I was able to find the equivalent FTD API documentation with the API Explorer that was found under the three dots at the top of the web page.

Thank you all for your advice and assistance.