Thinking of doing a specific Cisco certification (CC[NA|NP|IP|IE])? Then you might be interested in the Community Lab provided by Packet Life.

The ‘Community Lab’ is is divided up into 2 blocks with the same equipment. You are able to book one block of equipment or both for free of charge. Bookings seem to be booked well up into March currently, so it might be a while before you can get access.

Donations are encouraged, but not required in order to get access. Definitely an option if you can’t afford the lab prices offered by the various vendors to get some lab time.

I can’t explain how many times this has happened to me. You’re logged into a router scheduled to do a change and all of a sudden the router config has changed compared to what it was 5 minutes ago. IOS allows multiple users to be logged in and make changes at the same time. As such, only the last commands entered will actually be saved/used in the config.

The ‘config lock’ feature of IOS allows one user to obtain exclusive access to edit the config. It has two modes of operation:

The auto mode allows the first user to enter ‘config terminal’ to obtain the exclusive write access to the config, thus locking everyone else out:

Router0# configure terminal
Router0(config)# configuration mode exclusive auto
Router0(config)# exit
Router0# configure terminal <- exclusive write access automatically obtained

The manual lock option only obtains exclusive write access if the user enables it:

Router0# configure terminal
Router0(config)# configuration mode exclusive manual
Router0(config)# exit
Router0# configure terminal lock
Enter configuration commands, one per line. End with CNTL/Z.
*Feb 28 14:47:44.284: Configuration mode locked exclusively. The lock will be cleared
once you exit out of configuration mode using end/exit

Obviously I will be using the automatic lock feature so I don’t have to remember to enable it every time. If you want to see who has locked the config, type in ’show configuration lock’

As I wait for the CCNP self study guides to be released for the new CCNP i’ve been putting together a reading list of books to buy for the eventual journey to CCIE R&S. So far the list has:

No doubt the list is going to grow over the next year or two.

I’m sure everyone is aware of the ever decreasing amount of IPv4 addresses left unallocated. Basically there’s 7 billion people on the planet, but only 4 billion IP addresses. Unless people start turning off their routers and whatever else when they’re not being used, IPv6 is going to be needed fairly quick.

RIPE recently allocated the 1.0.0.0/8 and 27.0.0.0/8 space of addresses out to APNIC. With that move, over 90% of the IPv4 address space has been assigned. In a normal day-to-day environment as a network engineer, most people will configure 1.1.1.1 as the loopback on a router to do some testing. Other people use it as their pseudo RC1918 range to avoid overlapping. Hell, it’s even used as the ‘internet range’ in alot of Cisco documentation.

In what seemed to be to check on the pollution (how many people were using the range), RIPE NCC decided to announce some of the ranges in the 1.0.0.0/8 range. These were:

Keeping in mind, RIPE never expected this to be a clean prefix. In the past they had done some tests announcing various 1.0.0.0/8 ranges, however they’d never done 1.1.1.0/24 before. What they saw a few minutes after announcing the range was incredible however:

The traffic incoming basically jumps from 3MB/s to over 9MB/s, maxing out the link they had assigned for the testing. You would hope that your webhosting provider in Australia isn’t assigned any address space in that 1.1.1.0/24 block, otherwise you might be in for a large excess traffic bill. Unless the traffic sent towards that address space is somewhat reduced, it can’t be used in a production environment.

Come on IPv6!

I’ve been thinking about what to do with this blog for a while since it’s very rarely updated. Over the next 18 months or so I want to pass the new Cisco CCNP exams which were released last month. So this blog will likely have a heavy cisco influence for that time period as it will be taking up quite alot of my free time. Hopefully that will give me something worthy to blog about.

My aim is to complete the CCNP doing the self-study and using the GNS3 + Dynamips for the ‘hands on’ aspect of the learning, as the Cisco courses aren’t released for another 6 months. The PC I will be using for GNS3 is a quadcore with 8GB of ram, so hopefully I can run around 10-12 routers fairly comfortably before things begin to slow down. The only part of the studying i’ll need to pay for is the book (6 in total. 3 ‘cert guides’, 3 ’self study’ guides) and then the exams of course.

In a nutshell, Cisco have updated the CCNP in a fairly major way. The BSCI and BCMSN exams have been replaced by ROUTE and SWITCH exams respectively. There is also another new exam thrown into the mix called TSHOOT which covers troubleshooting in ‘real world’ situations. Removed from the old exams in the new ones are multicast, IS-IS and DHCP.

With all that, it might actually be time to buy the books now

CCNP page
NetworkWorld (alot more info)
Ciscoblog.com

Unison has been updated to version 2.0 after 15 months of being stuck at 1.8.1. The overall GUI has been redesigned and is definitely alot faster. Transfers are now grouped into released (ala most bittorrent clients and sabnzbd), unfortunately there is no “sort by average age, date, size” option in the transfer window. This means those of you with larger queues (basically anyone in Australia) will be stuck sorting your queues manually and hoping you download what you want before its out of your retention!

Other than that issue this is a welcomed update from the team @ Panic

As it stands now I have 13 drives in my unRAID NAS. 8 of the drives reside on 2 x Skymaster PCI SATA cards which have 4 ports each. While the parity check speeds are somewhat slow because of the nature of PCI everything has been working fine.

Now as all but 2 of my drives are 1tb or larger the time has come to purchase one or two PCIe SATA cards. Currently i’m looking at the Adaptec 1430SA cards since they’re supported in unRAID and in linux in general. I have been hanging out for the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 card which has 8 ports, however linux driver support is lacking and unfortunately I can wait no longer.