Recently I attended Networking Field Day 22 (NFD22) in San Jose, CA as a delegate. By attending NFD you may be exposed to companies that you may not normally come across. The first company that presented, DriveNets, was one of those companies and here is their story.

DriveNets was founded a little over 4 years ago with a mission to “disrupt network economics with growth-ready cloud-based infrastructure.” Their main target market is the Tier 1 ISP ( ATT, NTT, Level3, etc). They started with four things in mind.

1. Software-Based
2. Scale
3. Open Architecture
4. Simple Operation

When you look at a “legacy service provider” network, you will see that there are four primary layers. You have

• Last Mile (CE Router)
• Metro Aggregation (Metro)
• Provider Edge (PE Router)
• Core (P Router)

Happy Days have returned! I have been invited to attend Network Field Day #22 (#NFD22) in San Jose, CA on February 12-14, 2020. If you are unfamiliar with Network Field Day, it is an event that is organized by Gestalt IT Media, LLC and brings together vendors along with independent bloggers (delegates). You can find more information over at their Tech Field Day website.

The list of delegates for this event is, as always, impressive. I am really honored to be part of this event and to be included among this group of individuals. Below you will see a list of the delegates for NFD22 along with a link to their Tech Field Day bio page and their social media. What to be a Tech Field Day Delegate, just visit this link and go for it!

The other week month I was able to attend Juniper NXTWORK 2019 in Las Vegas, NV. If you are unfamiliar with Juniper NXTWORK, it is the Juniper customer and partner conference that is held all over the world.

This year they offered the traditional JNCIE Lab testing prior to the event as well as a 1.5-day Contrail training session. Since I was not taking a lab this year, I figured I would take the Contrail training class and see what it is all about. It was a nice introduction of Contrail v19 ( they changed the versioning to the year ). I may try to do another post on that later.

I also attended the Hack-A-Thon again this year, and that was a great experience. What I like about Juniper’s Hack-a-Thons is that they focus more on the hacking/security then they do on Juniper products per se. They approach it from a way to learn about security, how to look for things, and what you can do to protect your network. I will try to write more on the Hack-a-Thon in another post.

VRRP

Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) is commonly deployed on corporate networks in order to maintain default gateway redundancy for hosts. In this post, I will show you the commands to configure VRRP with route-tracking and interface-tracking.

For this lab, I will be using EVE-NG with four vSRX running 12.1X47-D15.4 code in packet-mode. I am using this version as it has the same features as newer codes, yet is less impactful on my lab hardware. The diagram for this lab is below, you can find the starting and ending configs at my GitHub repository. The root password for the devices is juniper123. BGP has been configured between INET and WAN1/WAN2 and is passing a default (0/0) route.

First up we will configure our VRRP on WAN1 and WAN2 using the virtual IP of 192.168.255.1. To configure VRRP there are a few things we need to remember in Junos.

• The VRRP group on both routers has to match
• In order to ping, you need to configure accept-data
• VRRP is configured under the interface IP address
• Higher priority is the preferred master
• Preempt is required if you want to allow for the backup to take over

This is the fifth post in the Loading Configs series. In this post, we will cover the load set command. This allows you to enter commands into the buffer just like you would on the CLI. All these commands are either set or delete based commands. Yes, you can use this to delete as well.

Here is a quick refresher on what we are doing…

It’s that time – time for Juniper NXTWORK 2019 in Las Vegas, NV at Ceasars Palace!

Few quick things to know before you go:

(Update on registration)
The Registration Desk is located on the 2nd Floor, Promenade Level.

The IOS and Andriod NXTWORK 2019 app have been published and are available for download. You can also search for the app by entering NXTWORK 2019 Americas. When you first launch it you will need to log in with your e-mail and then you can either use the default password of NXTWORK, or just reset your password ( that is what I did ).

This is the fourth post in the Loading Configs series. In this post, we will cover the load update command. We touched on this in post one when we discussed override. This command, update, is less destructive as it will update the configuration, yet the Junos device will only evaluate the differences between the running and what you have staged.

Here is a quick refresher on what we are doing…

For this lab series, we will use a simple topology to demonstrate the different ways to load configs. We have our SRX configured with TRUST and UNTRUST zones, a connection to the Internet, and a Windows 7 PC that has a browser installed. We will focus on making changes to our security policies.

This is the third post in the Loading Configs series. In this post, we will cover the load replace command. This command shines when you want to replace parts of a configuration without having to delete a bunch of stuff. It is really powerful in security policies and firewall filters, places where you tend to want to replace a lot of configs quickly.

This is the second post in the Loading Configs series. In this post, we will cover the load patch command. The beauty of the load patch command is that you can load the config on one device, issue a show | compare, and take that output and patch another device. This is also useful when you want to test your commands for a change, roll it back, and then re-apply it later.

Here is a quick refresher on what we are doing…

For this lab series, we will use a simple topology to demonstrate the different ways to load configs. We have our SRX configured with TRUST and UNTRUST zones, a connection to the Internet, and a Windows 7 PC that has a browser installed. We will focus on making changes to our security policies.

In this post series, we will cover one of the wonderful things with Junos, which is loading configurations to the devices. Compared to other vendors where you paste into a live configuration, Junus uses a candidate configuration for all changes. A great benefit of this is that there are a few ways to load configurations onto the devices.

The ways we can load the configurations are shown below.

  factory-default      Override existing configuration with factory default
  merge                Merge contents with existing configuration
  override             Override existing configuration
  patch                Load patch file into configuration
  replace              Replace configuration data
  set                  Execute set of commands on existing configuration
  update               Update existing configuration

I want to briefly touch on a few of the commands.

The first command, factory-default, is a way to soft reset the configuration back to the factory configuration without losing any of the locally stored data. The alternate way is factory default the configuration is to use the request system zeroize command. The zerioze command will rest the device back to the factory configuration and remove all locally stored user data (logs, files, etc).

The second command, override, will discard the current configuration and replace it with what you load into the device. When doing this the Junos device will re-evaluate the entire configuration you have entered. By re-evaluating the config, it will treat everything like it is new and you will have an impact to the device. If you want to just update the config and not re-evaluate everything, then you would use load update, which we will cover in post 4.

For this post, we will cover merge, patch, replace, update, and set.