Cisco has 'fessed up to forgetting the software needed to manage its Adaptive Security Appliances.

“Some … security appliances were shipped without the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) on-box management software,” Cisco says in a field notice. And it forget for quite a while: product shipped between February to October 2015 may not have included the software.

ASDM is billed as allowing users to “configure, monitor, and troubleshoot Cisco firewall appliances and firewall service modules”. So it's rather useful.

The good news is one can download the software, here, even if you don't have a service contract.

The bad is that one needs ASDM to run the appliances, so presumably more than a few users have been left stranded when they unpack their shiny boxes.

Cisco's made a few similar boo-boos of late, such as using the wrong default password, forgetting to install LEDs, botching RAID configurations and using a screw that's too long and could therefore expose users to live voltages. Just this week the company's also recalled switches that pose electrical dangers.

Cisco makes hundreds of products and these are just a few problems – most minor - spread across five months. But when you list them together, the Borg's errors do start to make it's not a pleasant sight for those considering reliability and quality.

The ASA5506, ASA5506W, ASA5506H, ASA5508 and ASA5516 appliances were impacted by the omission of ASDM. ®