OSPF Adjacency Building Process

Ever curious regarding how two routers configured for OSPF become fully adjacent?  The following diagram of the process was modeled directly from RFC 2328, and the steps described gleaned from the Routing TCP/IP Vol I book.  Since we can see mention of a DR, this example must be based on a multi-access network.

1. RT1 becomes active and sends a Hello.  At this point, RT1 hasn’t seen any neighbors, so it reports such and sets its DR and BDR fields to 0.0.0.0.
2. Upon receipt by RT2, RT2 will build a data structure for RT1 and set RT1’s state to Init.  RT2 will then send a Hello packet reporting that it has seen RT1, and will report itself as the DR.
3. RT1 now sees its own RID in the received Hello packet from RT2, so RT1 will now create a data structure for RT2 and set its state to ExStart.  RT1 then begins Master/Slave negotiation with a DD packet with a sequence number of “x”, the Init bit set  to indicate that it is the start of an exchange, the More bit set to indicate that it is not the last DD packet to Continue reading

Quiz #19 &#8211 Short Network Cuts with MSTP

As a senior network administrator, you receive complaints from server team that yesterday there were multiple short network cuts that impacted some very sensitive applications running in the data center. You investigate and find out that one of the level 1 network engineers performed some network changes. What went wrong?

Product & Routing Webinar: Multicast

Packet Design will be hosting a Product & Routing Webinar focused on Multicast on Wednesday, October 23 at 3pm CST. The event will feature Matt Sherrod, VP of Product Management, as its key speaker and will leave time after the live demonstration for Q&A. 

Register to attend here

OVSDB Echo in Python

OVSDB Echo in Python

OSPF Link State Advertisements (LSAs) and Areas – Part II

For a table describing the different LSA types, check out the first post of this series.

In the first part of the series, we looked at LSA Types 1, 2, and 3 – Router, Network, and Network Summary, respectively.  To move on to the next two LSA types, we need to bring in another Autonomous System (AS).  In the diagram below, we’ve added R5 which has an interface in EIGRP AS 1, and is redistributing that into OSPF Area 4.  The fact that R5 has an interface inside of the OSPF AS, as well as the EIGRP AS, makes R5 an Autonomous System Boundary Router (ASBR). 

The EIGRP-oriented subnet that is being redistributed is considered an external route to the OSPF domain, so a Type 5 LSA, or ASBR External, is flooded into OSPF Area 4 containing a LSID and netmask of the subnet, plus the External Type. This important because it tells other routers whether or not to add the internal link costs within the OSPF domain to the metric to reach that subnet.  A type 2 external route specifies that only the external cost is taken into consideration.

When R2 catches wind of Continue reading

Making sense of Broadband networks – VLAN Model

Understanding IPv4 uRPF on Junos DPC/MPC

Understanding IPv4 uRPF on Junos DPC/MPC

Understanding IPv4 uRPF on Junos DPC/MPC

Why so Rude?

The engineering world has a long standing tradition none of us should be too proud of: rudeness. There was, in fact, a time when I was working the phones on customer support that the general attitude was, “feel free to flame me when I ask a question, just answer the question in the flame.” Flames […]

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Russ White

Principle Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about, or don't really care about. You want numbers and letters? Okay: CCIE 2635, CCDE 2007:001, CCAr, BSIT, MSIT (Network Design & Architecture, Capella University), MACM (Biblical Literature, Shepherds Theological Seminary). Russ is a Principal Engineer in the IPOS Team at Ericsson, where he works on lots of different stuff, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, and is a cochair of the Internet Society Advisory Council. Russ will be speaking in November at the Ericsson Technology Day. he recently published The Art of Network Architecture, is currently working on a new book in the Continue reading

The Importance of Setting Expectations

One of my first experiences dealing with a technology customer involved a request to deliver and install a new PC and printer. During the process I expected I would need to educate the user on the features of Windows 3.1. This was before I ever really started working in technology in a full-time capacity. While […]

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Paul Stewart

Paul is a Network and Security Engineer, Trainer and Blogger who enjoys understanding how things really work. With nearly 15 years of experience in the technology industry, Paul has helped many organizations build, maintain and secure their networks and systems. Paul also writes technical content at PacketU.

The post The Importance of Setting Expectations appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Stewart.

TCP Over IP Bandwidth Overhead

How long will it take to transfer a 100MB file over an IPSec tunnel running across a dedicated 100Mbps Ethernet link? 1 Second? Fail! 8s? You’re getting warmer. It’s almost 8.5s without the IPSec and over 9s with it. What’s the big deal with a 1s difference? Well, extrapolate that increase, let’s say it’s 13%, and […]

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Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 15 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books and is a regular contributor at DevCentral.

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The post TCP Over IP Bandwidth Overhead appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

Healthy Paranoia Show 17: How Do I Pwn Thee?

Greetings fair ladies and kind sirs, I present yet another episode of Healthy Paranoia. In this episode we examine the notoriously mad, bad and dangerous to know; pentest dropbox. Joining Mrs. Y are some poètes maudits of the security realm, including; Taylor Banks, Dan Tentler, Kyle Stone, Nick Lennox and Jay James. A  dropbox or […]

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Mrs. Y

Snarkitecht at Island of Misfit Toys

Mrs. Y is a recovering Unix engineer working in network security. Also the host of Healthy Paranoia and official nerd hunter. She likes long walks in hubsites, traveling to security conferences and spending time in the Bat Cave. Sincerely believes that every problem can be solved with a "for" loop. When not blogging or podcasting, can be found using up her 15 minutes in the Twittersphere or Google+ as @MrsYisWhy.

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The post Healthy Paranoia Show 17: How Do I Pwn Thee? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

Seven reasons VMware NSX, Cisco UCS and Nexus are orders of magnitude more awesome together

Packet Design to exhibit at Africa Com

Packet Design will be exhibiting at Africa Com 2013, Nov 12-14 in Cape Town, South Africa. 

Register to attend the event here: 
http://africa.comworldseries.com/register/

VRF Export Maps

VRFs are an excellent tool for maintaining segregated routing topologies for separate customers or services. I've previously covered inter-VRF routing using route targets, but what if we only want to export a subset of the routes within a VRF? Here's a scenario in which this would be desirable.

Customers A and B each have a site network and a colocation network, and both customers need access to the 192.168.0.0/24 network in the Services VRF. The customers must utilize unique IP space in order to prevent overlapping networks, so each customer has been allocated dedicated IP space from their common provider out o 10.0.0.0/8. Unfortunately, customer A is still has some networks within the 172.16.0.0/16. These networks need to access services in the host colo, but the service provider can't allow this space to be advertised into the Services VRF as it's not approved IP space.

Our goal is to export only the networks within the 10.0.0.0/8 space from the customer VRFs to the Services VRF. How can we accomplish this?

Let's have a look at the initial network state. (This lab was performed using a single router for Continue reading

Leveraging LISP for IPv6 internet connectivity

Introduction End hosts inside of the enterprise or home can be connected to the IPv6 internet using LISP’s powerful encapsulation mechanisms. This article is structured in three sections exploring the utilization of LISP as means of IPv6 internet connectivity. The first section dives into IOS LISP IPv6 configuration and verification of the control-plane/data-plane. The use […]

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Pablo Lucena

The post Leveraging LISP for IPv6 internet connectivity appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Pablo Lucena.

Exploring OSPF Messages in a Multi-access Network

The following network is configured with OSPF with all interfaces in area 0.  Since this is a multi-access network, a Designated Router (DR) is elected which improves OSPF performance by reducing the amount of LSA flooding. R3 is the current DR, with R2 as the BDR.  R4’s interface to SW1 has been configured as a passive interface to prevent an adjacency from forming and simulate R4 being a “new” router on the network.  Wireshark is monitoring the link between R4 and SW1.

I won’t go into all the details regarding Wireshark output and the OSPF process.  If you want a more detailed analysis, take a look at my previous blog article here.  In this article, we’ll only be taking a closer look at what happens specifically in a multi-access environment.

Upon re-enabling R4’s interface for OSPF, we see R4 sends a Hello packet to the All OSPF Routers multicast address (224.0.0.5) and that no DR or BDR is listed.  R4 is “new” to the network as far as OSPF is concerned, so it has no idea about the current topology.

R1, R2, and R3 all send Hello packets with the Continue reading

OSPF Link State Advertisements (LSAs) and Areas – Part I

If every router in an enterprise environment was in a single OSPF area, at some point you’re going to encounter scalability issues due to any changes in the environment causing an SPF recalculation in all routers in that single area.

LSAs and their use within areas provide a mechanism for maximizing performance in OSPF by logically segmenting groups of contiguous links so that every router in the entire autonomous system does not have to have exact copies of the Link State Database (LSDB) and to reduce the amount of LSA flooding.  SPF calculations are also isolated to each individual area rather than the entire environment.  Different LSAs are used in different situations, and are treated differently depending on the type of OSPF area involved.

The following table represents the different LSA types, and was taken from the CCIE R&S OCG.