We ran into this today, and, though I knew it existed, I never actually saw it in the wild.  I’m talking about MAC access-lists.

In the example setup, we have a DMZ off of a firewall that contains a whole mess of servers – email, web, ftp, etc.  These should all be in the DMZ for sure, but they shouldn’t talk to each other.  If a bad guy was able to own my FTP server, he would have a nice platform to use to attack my email server.  That’s not cool, so we’ve put in MAC access-lists to help out.

Here’s a handy list of ACL entries to allow your devices to speak routing protocols, availability protocols, and some other stuff. We’ll assume you have ACL 101 applied to your Ethernet inbound; your Ethernet has an IP of 192.168.0.1.

• BGP : Runs on TCP/179 between the neighbors

access-list 101 permit tcp any host 192.168.0.1 eq 179

• EIGRP : Runs on its own protocol number from the source interface IP to the multicast address of 224.0.0.10

access-list 101 permit eigrp any host 224.0.0.10

There’s a very-overlooked feature of access-lists – the remark. Yes, this is very basic, but it’s worth mentioning, as it has saved me anguish time and time again.

I use remarks to document each line of an ACL (on IOS, PIX, FWSM, ASA, etc.) so that when I go back later, I actually know what I did. They’re simple to use, and, I promise you, you’ll thank yourself for using it when the CTO asks why access to TCP/80 is open from the Internet to the development server.