Learn Juniper and Cisco networking – with jokes!
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!
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.