This has been written about elsewhere, but thought it worth sharing since I’ve not posted much recently, and I find it both hilarious and very annoying.

The Cisco ASDM – Adaptive Security Device Manager – is  a Java client (which, utilising all that is best about Java, only runs on Windows) that gives you a GUI to manage Cisco Pix 7 devices like the ASA. I didn’t renew the Cisco support contract for our ASA after a couple of years, since it’s quite expensive and we were happy with how it’s running.

Now, I went to log into it the other day, and ASDM hung on login. Annoying.

The Java console showed the error “Exception in thread SGZ Loader,” which didn’t make much sense until I scrolled the console window to the right and found the line ended “For input string: ‘1 year 23’ .”

It seems that the ASDM client won’t log in if your ASA device’s uptime is over a year, because it can’t cope with the non-integer uptime string. I’m sure this is fixed in later versions of ASDM, but I can’t download them because our support contract ran out.

So it seems I’ll have to reboot the device in order to get the uptime back to being an integer. It’s lucky that Cisco is so professional and has decent QA, otherwise I might call this a complete fuck-up.