What about 2013?

Happy new year to you all! I truly hope that all your dreams for 2013 may come true and maybe even more.

For the first time I didn’t really made a to-do list for 2013, but in my head I’m still working on things I want to have accomplished by the end of the year. I wanted to discuss in short a few of those topics.

House

Just at the end of December I bought a house in Utrecht, Netherlands. This is going to fill up a lot of time for me in 2013, where I literally need to buy everything and arrange a lot of things.

Of course the fun part of designing my home network, automating my house as much as possible and designing my little office if already in progress :)

CCIE Data Center

The CCIE Data Center is also taking up a lot of time in 2013. Besides that I’m studying to pursue the title myself. I’m also writing the CCIE Data Center Lab Workbook for IPexpert. This is an amazing opportunity and I really love to work on it. I really hope you like using it when you purchase. Otherwise I’m more than happy to Continue reading

L2TP – Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol

How does the internet work - We know what is networking

L2TP Attributes Summary Projected L2TP standard was made available in the year 1999 by means of RFC 2661. It was originated primarily from two different tunneling protocols, named as: Point-to-Point communication protocol and PPTP (Point to Point Tunneling protocol). In other words, L2TP (Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol) is an up-and-coming IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) […]

L2TP – Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol

Offline Cable Management

Full disclosure: I got some stuff for free. Details.

In The Old Days
Cisco Catalysts used to be offered with RJ21 (Amphenol) connectors, rather than individual 8P8C jacks. Installations using this type of switch always stayed nice and clean regardless of the port density because the inevitable tangled mess of cable developed in a different rack, far away from failed fan trays, line cards, power supplies, etc...

I'm not sure why, but Cisco stopped offering line cards with RJ21 interfaces. It doesn't seem like this needed to happen: 1000BASE-T requires the same type of cable (Category 5) as 100BASE-TX, and Cisco demonstrated that the port density required for 48 gigabit ports is possible.

I worked in one environment where the tradition of remote patching continued on gigabit gear through the use of 25-pair cables terminated with six individual 8P8C connectors. Whenever a new switch or line card got installed, it was immediately populated with eight of these multi-headed copper cables. They terminated in a very large 110 block patch area. It worked well, but the Plug Pack is better.

Six Pack Rings For Network Cables
Panduit's Plug Pack modules keep your cables nicely collated, especially when a component is removed Continue reading

Installing apcupsd with USB Support on OmniOS

I installed OmniOS on my home filer over the Christmas break. Jumping from a Solaris Nevada build to OmniOS meant figuring out what software packages are available in the OmniOS repositories, what third-party repos are available and what software I would have to compile by hand. Given that this machine is only acting as a filer and isn't running any other services to speak of, the list of software to get up and running is small; however a critical component is apcupsd which talks to the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and cleanly powers down the filer if the power goes out for an extended time.

The hangup for me is that my UPS connects to the filer via USB, not a serial connection. It took me some hours to figure out how to get apcupsd installed with USB support. Here's how.

2012 in Review, and 2013 Resolutions

2012 has been a crazy year for me. I’d like to briefly summarize my year and publicly post some of my goals for 2013. Accomplishments in 2012 Blogging - Monthly Views to Keeping It Classless increased by over 450% this year, and every single month had consistently more views than the month before. I want to thank each and every one of you for reading my articles - I really only got into this recently and the explosive growth is still hard to believe.

2012 in Review, and 2013 Resolutions

2012 has been a crazy year for me. I’d like to briefly summarize my year and publicly post some of my goals for 2013. Accomplishments in 2012 Blogging - Monthly Views to Keeping It Classless increased by over 450% this year, and every single month had consistently more views than the month before. I want to thank each and every one of you for reading my articles - I really only got into this recently and the explosive growth is still hard to believe.

NDP – Neighbor Discovery Protocol: IPv6 Stateless address autoconfiguration SLAAC

How does the internet work - We know what is networking

IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol It’s the way the IPv6 hosts learn the addresses as well as about the neighbors around himself. That includes learning about other hosts and routers on local network. That is the biggest difference between IPv4 and IPv6. The Neighbor Discovery Protocol is also called ND or NDP, makes this and other […]

NDP – Neighbor Discovery Protocol: IPv6 Stateless address autoconfiguration SLAAC

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.


Quiz #2 &#8211 OSPF Redistribution between different processes

Redistribution between different or same routing protocols can become a nasty thing when there are 2 or more redistribution points.
In this quiz, redistribution is configured between 2 different OSPF processes on 2 routers. Without a proper configuration, this can lead to routing loops. Read the quiz to see the loop in action and try to solve it.

Upgrading ESXi Hypervisor to 5.1

Ahh the Christmas break. The perfect time for good food, enjoying the company of family and friends and of course…. IT projects at home! My project last year was to immerse myself in the source code for OpenBSD's snmp daemon so that I could integrate my patch-set for Net-SNMP directly into the native OpenBSD daemon. That was time well spent as I was able to integrate my code in the following weeks. This year I have maintenance to do in the home lab. It looks like 2013 is going to be a busy year as far as getting my hands on new stuff so I want the lab ready to rock.

First project: upgrade my VMware ESXi server from 4.1 to 5.1.

PNRP Name Resolution – How it works?

How does the internet work - We know what is networking

PNRP name resolution protocol uses this two steps: Endpoint determination – In this step the peer is determining the IPv6 address of the computer network card on which the PNRP ID service is published. PNRP ID resolution – After locating and testing the reachability of the peer with the PNRP ID with desired PNRP service, […]

PNRP Name Resolution – How it works?

PNRP the New DNS – Peer Name Resolution Protocol

How does the internet work - We know what is networking

PNRP – The Peer Name Resolution Protocol is new protocol made by Microsoft which is one of the first technology that will change the way we think about naming resolution in computer networking and possibly be the next DNS – Domain Name System like technology. PNRP is the new DNS but there are so much […]

PNRP the New DNS – Peer Name Resolution Protocol

Quiz #1 &#8211 MSTP

This is my first quiz and I chose an MSTP misconfiguration scenario that could be easily overlooked on the first encounter.
A fiber got cut revealed some hidden MSTP implementation problems. It was enough for one link to go down and the connectivity got impacted in a network that was supposed to be redundant. Read along and try to spot the problem.

Quick-n-dirty ‘network’ statement generator

I recently had a requirement to feed a lab router a bunch of BGP prefixes for some testing. The test required a non-overlapping, random-looking population of prefixes from several different eBGP neighbors.

I decided to bang together a little script to generate the prefixes in a format suitable for quagga's bgpd daemon, but wound up adding features throughout the day as I discovered new requirements. The end result was something that might be useful to somebody else.

Here I'm telling it to give me 5 network statements from within 10.0.0.0/8. The netmask will be 24 bits:
$ ./bgpdgen.pl -c 5 -n 10.0.0.0/8 -m 24
 network 10.160.244.0/24
 network 10.61.69.0/24
 network 10.13.1.0/24
 network 10.13.138.0/24
 network 10.50.109.0/24
Or I can have a range of bitmasks, this time the networks are packed much tighter and they'll be masked with 26 to 30 bits:
$ ./bgpdgen.pl -c 5 -n 10.0.0.0/24 -m 26-30
 network 10.0.0.224/28
 network 10.0.0.112/28
 network 10.0.0.0/26
 network 10.0.0.80/28
 network 10.0.0.24/29
Note however Continue reading

6VPE (IPv6 VPN Provider Edge Router)

6VPE is an easy solution to connect IPv6 customers through an existing stable IPv4 MPLS infrastructure. All clients have to do is to connect to a Provider Edge (configured with IPv6 VRFs) using IPv6. I hope this post will provide you with a brief and concise explanation about 6VPE. Let’s start with a short animation […]

Pinging a Firewall – Is It Up Or Down?

Let’s say you’re trying to find a free IP on a network so you can assign one to your PC to do some work. First off, shame on you for not using proper addressing design with an IP address manager software. Second, you might use basic ping tests to properly identify alive hosts vs. dead hosts (free IP addresses). Most do. In fact, you can use nmap to do simple ping sweeps of entire subnets.

Pinging a Firewall – Is It Up Or Down?

Let’s say you’re trying to find a free IP on a network so you can assign one to your PC to do some work. First off, shame on you for not using proper addressing design with an IP address manager software. Second, you might use basic ping tests to properly identify alive hosts vs. dead hosts (free IP addresses). Most do. In fact, you can use nmap to do simple ping sweeps of entire subnets.
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