I finally have all the equipment I need to build the lab. I also managed to get a Skeletek C24U rack, and it looks really nice. The fun already starts with assembling the rack as it comes in a relatively small box, including 6 pieces and a whole bunch of nuts and bolts.
Skeletek C24U
After 45 minutes or so the rack is fully assembled and ready to rack the first pieces of Cisco gear.
Assembled Skeletek Rack
After about two hours later I also racked all the Cisco equipment I have into the rack, including two PDU’s for some power juice.
Skeletek CCIE Home Lab Rack
Next step will be to put all the cabling in place. And hopefully the two octal cables (cab-octal-async) I ordered will arrive shortly, so I can also connect all the console outputs to the terminal server/router.
I've always been at odds with the recommendation in RFC 3177 towards allocating /48 IPv6 prefixes to end-sites. To me this seemed rather short-sighted, akin to saying that 640K of memory should be enough for anybody. It's essentially equivalent to giving out /12s in the IPv4 world which in this day and age might seem completely ridiculous, but let us not forget that in the early days of IPv4 it wasn't uncommon to get a /16 or even a /8 in some cases.
Granted, I know there are quite a few more usable bits in IPv6 than there are in IPv4, but allocating huge swaths of address space simply because it's there and we haven't thought of all the myriad ways it could be used in the future just seems outright wasteful.
So you can imagine my surprise and also my elation last week when the IETF published RFC 6177 entitled 'IPv6 Address Assignment to End Sites'. In it, the general recommendation of allocating /48s to end-sites that has long been the defacto standard since the original publication of RFC 3177 in 2001 has finally been reversed.
It seems that sanity has finally prevailed and Continue reading
Today, I received a very disturbing email on NANOG which was forwarded from a recipient on the Global Environment Watch (GEW) mailing list. If this is true, we all need to take steps to make an orderly and smooth transition to IPv6 as quickly as possible, lest we suffer from the harmful effects described in this email.
From: Stephen H. Inden To: Global Environment Watch (GEW) mailing list Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2011 00:19:08 +0200 Subject: IPv4 Address Exhaustion Effects on the Earth
At a ceremony held on February 3, 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the remaining last five /8s of IPv4 address space to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). With this action, the free pool of available IPv4 addresses was completely depleted.
Since then, several scientists have been studying the effects of this massive IPv4 usage (now at its peak) on the Earth.
While measuring electromagnetic fields emanating from the world's largest IPv4 Tier-1 backbones, NASA scientists calculated how the IPv4 exhaustion is affecting the Earth's rotation, length of day and planet's shape.
Dr. Ron F. Stevens, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said all packet switching based communications have some effect on the Earth's Continue reading
One of the first things I wanted to do with my ESXi lab box was to simulate a hard drive failure to see what alarms would be raised by ESXi. This exercise doesn't serve any purpose in the “real world” where ESXi hosts are likely to be using shared storage in all but the most esoteric of installations but since my lab box isn't using shared storage I wanted to make sure I understood the behavior of ESXi during a drive failure. This post is also a guide to my future self should a drive fail for real :-).
I’ve almost acquired all equipment that I need to build my CCIE home lab. I only have to pickup a 3725 router and a 2610.
Looks pretty impressive if you ask me 
It's been a long time since I've taken a run at getting Olive up and working. I wanted to take another stab at it and document how to get a working Olive installation using the latest JUNOS code. I also wanted to document how to get Olive up inside VMware ESXi since I hadn't actually done that before.
I recently built a VMware ESXi host at home. When I was researching the hardware, I learned there are a number of things to consider when choosing a RAID card for use under ESXi. This article covers those things and offers advice for anyone who is building a similar system.
As many of you know, Juniper is currently undergoing a massive effort to update their certification program. The previous track in 'Enterprise Routing' is now changing to 'Enterprise Routing and Switching' incorporating elements from the previous certification track in addition to some new elements essential to Enterprise switching such as Spanning-Tree, VLANs, Layer 2 Security, as well as High Availability features like Virtual Chassis. We can expect that a lot of the topics like Firewalling and NAT will be removed from this exam as these topics will more properly appear in the Security track.
Although the new JNCIE-ENT certification is planned to be released in August 2011, there are many of you who are currently pursuing the existing JNCIE-ER before time runs out. The good news is that Juniper plans to continue offering the existing JNCIE-ER exam until October 2011 so there is still quite a bit of time for those who are interested in attaining this certification.
There probably isn't a single day that goes by that I don't receive an email inquiry from someone currently pursuing the JNCIE-ER with a request to learn from my experiences and test preparation techniques. And although this exam Continue reading
apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-binStep 2: obtain PGP key, configure apt Continue reading
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libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
libgd2-noxpm libjpeg62 libperl5.10 nagios-plugins-basic
php5-common postfix ssl-cert nagios-plugins-standard
nagios-plugins-extra git-core make