How to reset a Cisco ASA to factory defaults

Hi folks, here's a common question that comes up. How do I reset a Cisco ASA(Adaptive Security Appliance) firewall to factory defaults? You would think this answer would be an easy one, but due to there being more than one way to skin a cat, sometimes you might think you reset it when in fact you only partially did.

The most common way I see people doing a reset is the following method from the CLI:

• enable
• write erase
• revert webvpn all
• delete disk0:sdesktop/data.xml
• reload

Unfortunately this does not reset the ASA firewall to factory defaults. All this does is erase the config. A lot of things will still exist after this including the passwords you set previously and the hostname assigned to the firewall. This isn't what we want, and we might end up carrying over this information that we didn't want.

So instead, to reset to factory defaults, do the following:

• configure factory-default [ip_address [mask]]

This will completely reset the device to factory defaults. You will even have to tell the router what the default boot image and asdm vesion is again otherwise it will boot with the old one from flash.

Hope this helps! You can read more about the product details of the Cisco ASA here.

Cisco, ASA, 5505, 5510, configure factory-default, config factory-default, reset factory defaults

-RP