Opinions on the PDM

[dshinnick]

My first time here; I'm very impressed with the attention given to those who need help. I guess I would like some general thoughts.

I'm a community college instructor teaching a CCNA program. One of my huge gripes with Cisco is their outdated, antiquated, counter-intuitive IOS. So, when I considered teaching PIX, and saw that it had a graphical interface, I was pleased and excited. Even Cisco's documentation crows about it, says it can do virtually everything the CLI can do, and they suggest that it be the *primary* method of managing the PIX. I've spent several hours on it now, and while it's MUCH better than CLI, there is still a definite learning curve. All the books I have are geared to CLI, as are the posts here. So I guess I'm wondering, what are the attitudes toward the PDM? What's the best way of translating from CLI commands to PDM? Other than the materials on Cisco.com, are there any that are really geared toward using the PDM to manage the PIX?

Sorry for rambling..thanks for the thoughts.

dave s.

[sachinraja]

Dave,

As with other products, the GUI in cisco is sophisticated to the max extent. You can do/configure almost everything from GUI.. the best way of dealing with this, is to first test a pix with all commands like static, acl, telnet , outbounds etc on the GUI and see the effect it makes on the CLI.. To be very frank, i havent used PIX PDM at all for configuring stuffs. CLI always makes my life easier and safe...

You should anyway have a good grip of the CLI commands and the effects of each command. take a test PIX and make hundreds of changes through GUI.. thats the best way to learn..

all the best dude...

Raj

[dopenfield]

In a learning environment, Be sure to set preferences to preview commands before sending them from the PDM to the PIX.

I find this very helpful for getting the syntax correct when I haven't done a particular task or CLI command in a while. It may take several commands to implement a change and the PDM will take care of getting them in the right order and not forget to re-apply an ACL after a change.

You don't have to allow the change to go through at that time just copy the commands to a text file and paste them into CLI at another time. Good for trying different scenarios in a lab environment.

[jolangford]

Let me preface this with: I am a CLI fan and don't like the GUI interfaces.

I have used PDM for 3 years and find it useful for monitoring but not for configuring. I always use the CLI to configure my PIXs. I often have to configure the commands that the PDM does not support.

You also should look at ASDM which is the PDM replacemnet for PIX relase 7.x