NETWORK FUN-TIMES

If you’re thinking about taking Juniper’s excellent Service Provider exam, give this a read – I’ve hooked you up with a ton of useful links!

Regular readers of this blog probably see me as an extremely clever, flawless hunk who knows a lot, never makes mistakes, and is traditionally handsome but with a modern style. And of course, you’re not wrong. Except, here’s the twist: you’re dead wrong.

This is a post about the different ways, and reasons why, we might move prefixes between the inet.3 and inet.0 tables on a Juniper router. You know: like George Clooney does in his spare time. Probably. Don’t look that up.

In this first of a two-part post, I’m going to take you on a magical journey. And by “take you on a magical journey” I mean “teach you what the inet.3 table does on a Juniper router.” Which is basically the same thing as a magical journey, right?

Network engineers often find they need a way to test something, and then take some action if that test fails. Well, you can do these tests oh-so-easily in Junos with a thing called Real-Time Performance Monitoring. RPM is what “other vendors” might call IP SLA. How do they work? Good question, Andrew! Let’s find out.

Imagine a user who says they’re only able to access even-numbered IPs in a destination subnet. “Help!”, they say. “I can’t leave the office until this is fixed, and I need to leave now because my seven large sons require their tri-daily feed of protein shakes. They will whither and die unless I nourish them immediately. The fate of my powerful sons is in your hands, and yours alone.” This exact problem came in to us recently. Well, apart from the bit about the large sons.

This is the third and final part of my whistle-stop tour of IS-IS, for people studying for their Juniper JNCIS-SP and JNCIS-ENT exams. In this post, we learn how to troubleshoot IS-IS. Are you wearing your safety hat? Then, let’s go!

In Part 2 we take a deeper-dive into IS-IS. We do packet captures of LSAs, we look at the metrics, the Designated Intermediate-System, and we even explore our feelings together, so that we can finally find inner-peace with ourselves. Great!!!

Here’s the first of our three-part beginners guide to IS-IS. We’ll compare it to OSPF; we’ll talk about Level 1 and Level 2; we’ll explain the bizarre addressing system; we’ll look at a basic config, and we’ll talk about why Googling for IS-IS is very different from Googling for ISIS.

In the 90s, the big fashion was Tamagotchis. In 2017 it was fidget spinners. And of course, in 2018 there’s only one trend on everyone’s lips: route summarisation. In Junos there’s three ways to summarise routes. Want to know what they are? Well gosh damn, you’ve come to the right place!

Want to learn how to configure Chassis Cluster, which lets you configure high-availability failover on Juniper firewalls? Good luck with the official documentation – it weighs in at precisely 638 pages long. 638 pages! That’s the length of two good books! Or one badly edited one. Anyway, this article is my attempt at boiling those 638 pages down into something a bit more manageable. You can thank me by emailing me £700,000.

Once you’ve read my guide to the new link-state advertisement types in OSPFv3, give this post a read, where we take a deep-deep into the OSPFv3 database. Put your topology hat on: we’re going exploring.

When I first heard that OSPFv3 introduced even more link-state advertisement (LSA) types, I despaired. As if the original seven didn’t take us long enough to memorise! Then I actually learned what they do – and honestly, it’s hard to imagine why we ever did it any differently. Let’s learn about them together!

If you ever find a new BGP neighborship isn’t coming up, here’s a list of things to check. That is, unless you’re a coward?

There’s two handy Cisco troubleshooting tips I’ve learnt during my time as a network engineer. The first is to just ignore a problem and go to the pub. The other tip is the debug condition command, which helps you to troubleshoot by limiting debug messages to certain interfaces, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and a whole lot more.

A little while ago, I was mucking about with some EIGRP authentication in a lab. Because when I party, I party hard. Rock and roll is an integral part of my soul. Anyway, EIGRP was running. Neighbors were formed. And then I added a keychain, and applied it to my interfaces. The neighborship dropped, tried to re-establish – and failed. Why? Let’s find out!

Big-ups to the designers of OSPF for giving very similar names to two totally different things. In this post, we clarify the difference between stub areas and stub networks.

When you’re first getting to grips with your router’s OSPF database, you might see mention of something called a “stub network”. And let me tell you: never before have I seen a phrase so clumsily defined. Let’s take a look, and find out what a stub network actually is.

Stub areas are a very easy concept to understand, but it comes with a ton of specific jargon that can make it super-daunting. So, in this post I’ll take time to explain these concepts, and to define just enough jargon to make you feel like you’re part of the elite. We’ll take it slow, like new lovers, or someone cooking an expensive turkey.

When you’re configuring a router for IPv6, what subnet mask should you use on your point-to-point links?
I’ve seen some people use /64s, I’ve seen other people using /127s – and even subnet masks in between. Do any of these people know what they’re doing? Almost certainly not. But hey, that doesn’t mean we can’t work out the pros and cons of both subnet masks – because it turns out that the question of which one to use is actually a bit tricky.

If you’re cool, hip, and “with it”, you’ll know there’s one thing millennials just can’t stop talking about: MPLS VPNs. But: how do you configure them? Well, it’s a good job you came to me – because in this article you’ll learn exactly how. We’ll configure it together, we’ll type some show commands to learn exactly what’s going on – and then we’ll look at how to troubleshoot it when it breaks.

Sometimes when you’re looking at a router’s BGP routing table, you might see that a prefix is being advertised to an “update-group”. Now, you might think to yourself: wait a second, I didn’t configure any update-groups. Unless I did it when I was drunk? Well, I’m happy to tell you that this time you didn’t get up to any DBGP (Drunken Border Gateway Protocol): this happens automatically. Let’s find out what it means!

Something that took me ages to grasp was the difference between BGP route-distinguishers and route-targets in MPLS VPNs. And even when I thought I understood, I still didn’t see why we needed both. Why not just have the one number to fit both tasks? Click this post, and find out all about it!