Cisco IDS licensing

[msmitha]

How does licensing work for the Cisco IDS (appliances and the IDSM2)? After receiving a new Cisco IDS (appliance/IDSM2), are we supposed to request a valid Cisco IDS license? Or does it work straight out of the box without any licensing? What about licensing for the IDSM2?

How can we get the Upgrade/Re-installation CDROM for 4.x?

[pcomeaux]

The sensor will work out of the box.

You initially bootstrap the sensors with the methods mentioned in the Getting Started Guide that ships with each sensor. The same is true for the IDS stand-alone sensors and the IDSM-2.

After this, you can use either the embedded IDS Device Manager (free) or Cisco Works VMS. IDM offers per device management. If you use IDM, you would need to download IDS Event Viewer from CCO. IDS Event Viewer is an application you install on a server. IEV can receive events from up to 5 sensors.

An alternative is to use VMS. VMS provides a Management Center for IDS (where you configure and tune the IDSs) and Security Monitor (where you view events, run reports, and setup alerts and notifications events). VMS is licensed for Restricted or Unrestriced. Restricted permits up to 20 devices to be managed from a single install of the VMS components. The Unrestricted version does not limit the number of devices to be managed from a single install of the product components.

In order to get the 4.x upgrade cd, visit http://www.cisco.com/upgrade and enter a valid Smartnet contract for your sensor. If you do not have Smartnet on your sensor, the upgrade cd can be purchased with the following part # IDS-SW-K9-U.

Hope this helps,

peter

[thisisshanky]

Cisco IDS box should work without any license. The license required is for the host based ids sensors. You can buy the console and a single host based license, or you can purchase host based licenses at increments of 25, 50 etc.