Cisco ASA TCP Connection Flags

I got asked to look into a problem where two servers where not able to communicate with each other, ping didnt work and the application could not connect to the server. Firewall rules and routing was fine and my colleague spend already over an hour but couldnt find something. The first thing I asked, do you see a TCP connection? He told me yes over the ASDM logging I see something…. I double check and connect to the console and run:

show conn address 10.20.100.21

Show conn output:

TCP DMZ 10.10.127.29:2222 TRANSFER 10.20.100.21:42799, idle 0:00:00, bytes 0, flags saA
TCP DMZ 10.10.127.29:2223 TRANSFER 10.20.100.21:63554, idle 0:00:00, bytes 0, flags saA
TCP DMZ 10.5.63.29:2220 TRANSFER 10.20.100.21:59274, idle 0:00:00, bytes 0, flags saA
TCP DMZ 10.5.63.29:2221 TRANSFER 10.20.100.21:55782, idle 0:00:00, bytes 0, flags saA

I saw directly that the TCP connection was not open because the connection flag was “saA” what means outbound SYN was send and a connection is reserved but no SYN ACK came back. The problem in the end was that between these two servers was a VPN and that the IP network was missing in both crypto map’s what was then easy to find and solve in the end.

The command “show conn ?” give you enough information and when it comes to troubleshooting that you need to know basic troubleshooting skills because some stuff is not easy to find out over the ASDM and to use the command line instead.

Here the overview over the ASA TCP connection flags which are important to know or at least to know where to look them up 😉

Here the document from Cisco: ASA TCP Connection Flags (Connection build-up and teardown)

 

Cisco ASA TCP Syslog Problem

I ran today into a big problem with configuring an TCP syslog server on an Cisco ASA.

logging host "interface_name" "server_ip" tcp/514

After I put in the configuration and someone from the server administration restarted the syslog server and suddenly the whole communication through the ASA stopped working completely.

I saw the following messages in the ADSM and quickly realised that this could be only caused by the TCP logging configuration.

%ASA-3-201008: Disallowing new connections

I didn’t looked before if the feature is disabled to block new connections when a TCP-connected syslog server is down. This is very important that you disable the feature before you configure TCP syslog servers otherwise you ran into the same problem like me.

Here the command to disable the feature:

logging permit-hostdown

In my case I just forgot to check before and will definitively remember for the next time 😉