Transparent Cisco IOS Firewall(ترجمه فارسی بزودی در همین وبلاگ)

Transparent Cisco IOS Firewall

Cisco IOS routers can be configured as a layer 2 bridges, this means that you can configure two or more interfaces to be in the same layer 2 domain and that traffic will be switched instead of routed. Another feature that has been added since IOS 12.3(7)T is the transparent Cisco IOS Firewall. This allows traffic filtering and stateful inspection using CBAC for the layer 2 bridge.

When you configure the router as a transparent firewall it will not do any routing and will only learn the MAC addresses on the interfaces and switch frames between the interfaces. The advantage of a transparent firewall is that you can place it at any location in your network without having to change any IP addresses or networking settings like default gateways.

To demonstrate this feature I will use the following topology: