yer Switches firewall appliances have been replaced with ASA models incorporating either better speed, a wider feature set, or both. Because the interfaces on an FWSM are switched virtual interfaces (SVIs), the FWSM is not limited to physical connections like an ap- pliance is. There can be hundreds of interfaces on an FWSM, each corresponding to a VLAN in the switch. The FWSM is also capable of over 5 Gbps of throughput, as compared with 1.7 Gbps on the PIX 535, which used to be the top-of-the line appliance. Now with the ASA 5580-40 supporting 10 Gbps, this is not nearly as impressive as it used to be. The FWSM supports multiple contexts, which allows for virtual firewalls that can serve different functions, be supported by different parties, or both. One example where this might be useful is for a service provider who wishes to provide individual firewalls to customers while having only a single physical device. While this is also something that used to be FWSM-specific, many of the ASA appliances now support contexts as well. The FWSM is a separate device in the chassis. To administer the FWSM, you must first connect to it. Here, I'm connecting to an FWSM in slot 8: Switch-I0S#session slot 8 proc 1 The default escape character is Ctrl-^, then X. You can also type 'exit' at the remote prompt to end the session Trying 127.0.0.81 User Access Verification Password: Type help or '?' for a list of available commands. Switch-IOS-FWSM > en Password: Switch-IOS-FWSM # If the FWSM is running in single-context mode, you will be able to run all PIX com- mands as if you were in any other PIX firewall. If the FWSM is running in multiple- context mode, you will be in the system context and will need to change to the proper context to make your changes. Do this with the changeto context command: Switch-I0S-FWSM#sho context Context Name Class Interfaces admin default disk:/admin.cfg *EComm default vlan20,30 disk:/Ecomm.cfg Switch-IOS-FWSM# changeto context EComm Switch-I0S-FWSM/EComm# At this point, you will be in the EComm c