April 26, 2007 by ted.

If you haven’t heard the buzz on Cisco NetFlow technologies, here’s your chance to gain some insight. NetFlow allows for some really awesome traffic analysis and reporting. With the help of NetQoS Reporter Analyzer, your networks will start telling some interesting stories.

Have you ever wondered how much traffic flowing through your network is P2P traffic?

Wouldn’t it be nice to know if an infrastructure upgrade is really the fix for your bandwidth problems?

NetFlow gives you information from your routers and switches regarding what they see on your network. Reporter Analyzer displays this information so that network engineers know exactly what’s going on in their networks. This visibility is something that we need when troubleshooting networks. Network engineers can now tune their networks to achieve the best performance possible!

Register for the NetFlow Webinar

Seats are limited so register today!

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April 24, 2007 by ted.

PE-CE routing with EIGRP

This is a continuation from Part II of the MPLS worklog

It’s time to test using an IGP between the PE and CE routers. I decided to start with EIGRP. Compared to using eBGP between the PE-CE routers, IGPs are somewhat more involved. The nice thing about using BGP is you don’t really have to mess with redistribution too much (except for connected or static routes). With an IGP such as EIGRP, you will have to redistribute twice on the PE router. It’s a little strange at first, but once you see the configuration, it should make sense.

First, here is the diagram for Part III

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Posted in Routing&Switching, Cisco | Print | 2 Comments »

April 20, 2007 by ted.

Do you ever get tired of having to jump back and forth between your routers with a console cable? Well if you haven’t heard already, get yourself a terminal server. Look for a 2511 or 2509 access router. You will see that these routers have a SCSI-looking connection on the front of the router. You can use this connection to connect multiple modems or in our case, routers. The 2509 supports 8 console connections while the 2511 will support 16. They don’t come with the cables, so don’t forget to buy them too.

Here are some pics of the router and cable(s) you need:

2509

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April 20, 2007 by ted.

This is a continuation from Part I of the MPLS worklog

PE-CE routing with BGP

I wanted to touch a little bit more on the subject of using BGP as a PE-CE routing protocol. In most cases, you probably won’t be using BGP as the routing protocol between the CE and PE routers (in terms of site-to-site VPN usage). In some cases, your sites may need to rely on BGP for internet routing and therefore we probably want to use an IGP protocol for route sharing between our VPN sites (especially if our sites use private IPv4 addressing). Don’t forget that our CE routers can only run one instance of BGP (only 1 BGP AS per router). Unless we are using static routing for internet access, we probably don’t want to waste our only instance of BGP for routing between our PE-CE routers. Now in some cases, our provider could import all routes from its global routing table into our vrf table—from the research I’ve done, this is very bad. Adding Internet access really introduces a lot of possibilities for how we can do things. I will cover more on Internet access later. Let’s get back on track here and take a look at the diagram below.

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April 19, 2007 by ted.

I’ve noticed that I’m seeing a lot of CCNA lab questions showing up on forums. For the most part, everyone wants to know what hardware they should get, or will this particular router work for CCNA etc, etc. I figured since I’ve been teaching CCNA for over 5 years that I could shed some light on the subject. If you noticed, everyone has their own opinions on which routers/switches are the best to get. I will explain some options along with my personal advice for what you need to pass the current CCNA.

Option 1 – buy the hardware

The budget CCNA lab-

Most people cringe when people suggest using the 2500 series in their CCNA labs. The 2500 series routers have been around for a long time and they were the primary series used for CCNA training (at least back in the day when I started). If money is a concern, you can probably get used 2500 series routers for less then $100. They work fine for probably 90% of CCNA content today—yes, I picked that percentage semi-randomly. On the switch side of things, I strongly recommend going with the 2950 series switches. Do not—I repeat—Do not go with the 1900 series switches. They are mostly CAT-OS-based and not much help for the switching labs.

Here is an equipment breakdown (minimum quantities):

4 x 2514 series routers (2 AUI interfaces)

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