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Do you use an ASA to provide SSL VPNs for your organization? If so would you like to be able to publish RSS newsfeeds to your users login portal page? The ASA provides you this capability and this post is focused on walking you through the steps of configuring this capability. In order to configure the RSS newsfeed for the users, the feed must be accessible via http or https. You can create your own RSS .xml file manually and place it in an directory on your web server or connect to an already established feed from an external website. In this demonstration I will connect to a few already established feeds from Cisco and from 6200networks.

The easiest method to configure this on the ASA is by using the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM). The ASDM is a GUI-based management interface for the ASA and in this demonstration we will be using ASDM version 6.0. First thing we need to do upon connecting to our ASA with the ASDM is to navigate to the Configuration > Remote Access VPN > Clientless SSL VPN Access > Portal > Customization page. The screenshot below details the view of the Customization page (your view may vary depending on your configuration).

From here you will need to either edit the DfltCustomization Object by selecting it and clicking the ‘edit’ button or you can create a new customization object by selecting ‘add’. In this demo we will simply edit the DfltCustomization Object by highlighting it and selecting ’edit’. 

Once you click the edit button, the ASDM spawns your Web broswer to begin the customization process. In my case, I’m using IE7. You should now see a screen that is titled the ‘SSL VPN Customization Editor’ window. This window will have three panes located on the left-hand side of the screen. We now need to click on the Portal pane then select the ‘Custom Panes’ hyperlink.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now we need to select RSS from the drop down menu located on the right hand side of the screen and click the ‘Add Pane’ button as shown below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new RSS type object has now been defined and we now need to populate the parameters of the feed. First we need to determine if we want the feed enabled or not by selecting enabled or disabled from the drop down menu. In our case we want it enabled so we select enabled. Next we have to define a relevant for the feed, this title will be displayed to our users upon logging to their SSL VPN portal page, in my case my title is defined as ‘6200networks’. We also have to define the full path to the RSS feed file in the URL section @ the bottom of the page. In our example we are going to use the RSS path of 6200networks RSS file “http://6200networks.com/?feed=rss2“. You may or may not also want to include a border for the feed, I personally like to include one because it adds to the aesthetical cleanliness of the page. You can also define the parameters for the other choices as well if you need/want to, we will cover a few of these parameters in just a bit. Now you should have the fields populated as such:

You now need to click “save” at the top right corner of the screen. If you only want to include one RSS feed to the users portal page then at this point you are finished. You can have your users login and if you correctly configured all of the parameters above the user should see the RSS field populate upon logging in.

If however you want to add more than one RSS to the page (like myself) we have a couple of more steps to complete. In my case I want my portal page to be populated with 4 different feeds. In order to do this we needs to add additional columns for the feeds. This is done on the ‘SSL VPP Customization Editor’ by selecting Portal on the left hand panel and then selecting the columns options. The columns page now opens and I want to add 3 additional columns by clicking the ‘add columns’ button 3 times. Now I have a total of 4 colums defined but I have to now allocate page to the columns. In my case I want to give each column 25% of the screen. I do this by putting 25 in the blank % windows for columns 1-4 as shown below:

Now I need to navigate back to the ‘Custom Panes’  screen by selecting it and go through the process we defined earlier for creating an RSS object. In case I do it three more times to bring my feed total to 4. Once I have all my feeds created and their paramenters defined, I now need to put each feed into their own column. This is done by selecting the column drop down button and selecting the column in which this feed is to appear as shown below:

At this point I click ’save’ in the upper right hand corner of the screen and I have completed everything I need to have my feeds populate my portal page….upon logging into my SSL VPN portal page I am now presented with all the posts from my 4 different feeds as shown below: