A Network Blog by a Network Engineer

Cisco ASR9904 Series Router

Jeff Fry published on 2013-09-19 included in Cisco Live Cool Tech

ASR9904

Ok, not new information but kind of new information to share.

Back in June during Cisco Live Orlando 2013 during the session BRKARC-2003 – Cisco ASR9000 System Architecture there where some slides that discussed a couple new ASR9000 series routers, the ASR9904 and ASR9912.

The ASR9904 is supposed to be released in October ’13, and that happens to also coincide with the rumored IOS-XR 5.1 release of code. Well, to date only the ASR9912 has been announced ( http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps13288/index.html ), but with the recent release of the IOS-XR 5.1 Release Notes on Cisco’s website, the ASR9904 is listed there as can be seen in a snippet from that file: ( the original pdf release notes can be found here http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/routers/asr9000/software/asr9k_r5.1/general/release/notes/reln_510a9k.pdf )

VASI – VRF Aware Service Infrastructure Interfaces and Global Route Leaking

Jeff Fry published on 2013-08-28 included in Cool Tech How To IOS XE

VASI – VRF Aware Service Interfaces, what the heck are those?! Cisco has defined a VASI interface as: VASI is implemented using virtual interfaces that provide the framework necessary to configure a firewall and NAT between VRF instances. Each interface pair is associated with two different VRF instances. The two virtual interfaces, called vasileft and vasiright, in a pair are logically wired back-to-back and are completely symmetrical. Each interface has an index. The association of the pairing is done automatically based on the two interface indexes such that vasileft automatically gets paired to vasiright. So you could look at a VASI interface as like a back-to-back connection between VRFs – call it a virtual cable of sort. You can also see that the traditional use of a VASI interface is to connect two VRFs, on the same router, together so they can route and NAT between each other. But what I am saying about Global Route Leaking? Well, recently I had a problem where a client wanted to leak routes, dynamically, from a VRF to the Global table on an ASR1000 with an RP1 installed. We could easily have done it via a physical cable, but I knew their had to be a better way. I did some digging on the VASI interface and possible configurations and came across this – added in IOS XE 3.10S code is the ability to actually BGP peer over the VASI interfaces to exchange routes.
You may click on the image below to view the PDF on this.

Site Maintenance

Jeff Fry published on 2013-06-21 included in Uncategorized

Just a heads up. The ISP that this server is hosted at is doing some maintenance this weekend. The site will be down from Friday night until sometime on Sunday. (6/22-23/2013)

Dell PowerEdge VRTX (Vertex)

Jeff Fry published on 2013-06-10 included in Data Center Dell

While attending the Dell Enterprise Forum last week, Dell announced the PowerEdge VRTX. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this was the scene in Thor where Natalie Portmans say “Oh….My….God” (Youtube) So, what is this Dell PowerEdge VRTX that has me, and many others, all in a giddy? Well, it is server that can hold up to 4 blades, has an 8-port L2 gigabit switch, and can support up to 25 – 2.5in HDD (or 12 – 3.5in HDD) drives — that is the potential for 48TB of storage!! It can be configured in a tower (like pictured above) or in a rack and take up 5 RU of space. So what you have is a server that utilizes blades, hard-drives, and has 8–port L2 gig switch blade! Oh, best of all, this runs on 110v and is whisper quiet! Talk about perfect for a home lab – oh yeah!!!! The only bad part here, the street price is said to be less then $10k, bit out of home-lab money. But then again, when one thinks of all the hardware and storage that we have in our basements/closets/offices – that might be close to our pre-existing investment. Looking over my notes from the Dell Enterprise Forum where this device was announced, here is a quick bullet list of what I have:

Dell Enterprise Forum 2013

Jeff Fry published on 2013-06-09 included in Dell

If you follow me on Twitter, you no doubt know I was in San Jose, CA attending the Dell Enterprise Forum ( formerly Dell Storage Forum ) last week. I attended this event on an invite from Dell, and I am so glad I accepted. The event was full of great information and many other great “social media influencers” as we where called. I have met many of my twitter peers before, but others I had not – being at the forum allowed me to put faces and real names to twitter handles. I think having the prior social interaction with them before made this event that much better. It was great of Dell to bring us together to listen, learn, and share ideas. So, the purpose of this post is to recap the week, point out some highlights, some low, and set the stage for another post or two.

The whole theme of the event seemed to be around Ordinary -> Optimized. Dell would show and present Ordinary things, and then how they Optimized them. It was a theme they kept moving in all that they did. From the legos laying around in the lounge area, the old Atari 2600 systems, to a full wall sized modern Tetris game. They showed Ordinary and then Optimized it!

F5 Certifications – F5 Certified Administrator

Jeff Fry published on 2013-05-31 included in Certification F5

F5_CA_lg

Ahh, Certifications! The thing that drives many of us to learn new things as well as show what we have learned.

Recently at work there was a request for some of us to get F5 certified and I figured what the heck. I have had some exposure to F5 Load Balancers in the past and have also had some intimate times other vendors products. So, I figured I would take the time and focus on the F5 product and obtain the certification I was much more challenging that I thought it would be – but it was fun!

It seems as though F5 recently revamped their certification guidelines, testing procedures, and tests. I do not know exactly when they started to revamp them, but I know it was recent based on the BIG-IP Certification Administrator going live on 3/18/13. Based on this, the material available to study is few and far between as well many have not been exposed to the Professional Pearson Vue centeters that F5 users to administer the test. I will cover the Pearson Professional centers as part of this post and will focus on the required tests (101 and 201) in separate posts. There is just two much information for one post!

Cisco Live Blogger Contest

Jeff Fry published on 2013-05-03 included in Cisco Live

Blog

Love to blog? Going to Cisco Live in June? Want to have a chance to win a free four-hour lab or technical session? Well then, read on!

Oh, and if you have never taken a 4–hour lab or technical session, they are wonderful. These are sessions that cost extra and are not part of the normal conference fee. I believe they are to take place on Sunday, June 23rd.

Open Networking Summit 2013

Jeff Fry published on 2013-04-08 included in GuestPost

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Ok, this post is a bit out of the ordinary for me, but I wanted to pass along some information that was sent to me and post it as a “guest-post”. I will be attending the ONS Summit next week as part of the company that I work for, Torrey Point – Full-Service Network Consultancy, as a paid participant. I wanted to share this post with you in the case that you would be attending, perhaps we can meet up when time allows.

– Fryguy

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the buzzword on the mind of every player in the networking and telecom ecosystem; promises to revolutionize networking as we know it and will affect service provider networks, cloud networks and enterprise networks.

Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2013 is the premier conference for SDN and Open Flow and has established itself as the leading event to ‘plug-in’ to SDN.

Cisco Live 2013 – CCIE Labs Available!

Jeff Fry published on 2013-04-04 included in CCIE Cisco Live

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Well that image there might be familiar to some of us! But good news, once again, the CCIE Labs will be available as Cisco Live 2013!

Below is an e-mail I just received, so if you are ready, no better place to take the lab then Cisco Live!

CCIE Lab Exams Available June 22-23 at Cisco Live 2013, Orlando

Attending Cisco Live in Orlando? You can take your CCIE lab exam while you are there.
We encourage you to take advantage of the CCIE lab exams that will be available in Orlando June 22-23 as part of Cisco Live. The CCIE labs being offered during the event will allow qualified candidates who are registered for Cisco Live to more easily and quickly take the exam, reducing the waiting time, effort, and costs accrued by having to travel separately. The eight-hour lab exam tests your ability to configure actual equipment and get the network running in a timed-test situation.

OSPF Router-ID and Traceoptions

Jeff Fry published on 2013-04-03 included in How To Junos

OSPF Lab Topology

Ok, time for some of the other things that we might do with OSPF. First up, router-ids. For this lab, we will create router-ids in the form of xx.xx.xx.xx where x=Router number. For example, R4 will be 44.44.44.44, and we won’t use a loopback interface for this.

First we can start with changing it on R4:

R4(config)#router ospf 1

R4(config-router)#router-id 44.44.44.44

Reload or use “clear ip ospf process” command, for this to take effect

So we have to clear the OSPF process in order for this to take effect.

R4(config-router)#^Z

R4#clear ip ospf process

Reset ALL OSPF processes? [no]: y

R4#

Ok, we should now have a Router-ID of 44.44.44.44.

R4#sh ip ospf | inc ID

Routing Process “ospf 1” with ID 44.44.44.44

Good. Time to recheck connectivity.

R4#ping 3.3.3.3 so lo 0

Type escape sequence to abort.

Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 3.3.3.3, timeout is 2 seconds:

Packet sent with a source address of 4.4.4.4

!!!!!

Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/1/4 ms

R4#

Good, we can still ping R3 from R4. Now, let’s do the same thing on J2.