I’ve been doing a lot of IPv6 stuff lately, and one of the things I didn’t find (and kinda just wanted to put one together for my own benefit) is a matrix of features I thought were important to have on the IPv6 side for common network hardware. Below is a work in progress of what I have so far, which will automatically publish changes from this spreadsheet. Please email me if you’re interested in adding to this or correcting anything I may be incorrect on.

I have huge iPhoto and iTunes catalogs. This can present a problem for both loading the applications and for backup. I have learned to deal with the Application load times, but backups are very important to me. I’d gone through the iPhoto backup process and restore more than once, and I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have an offsite backup, so I paid for a flickr pro account ($24/yr, supports iPhoto export and RAW format).

We are putting a few new SRX 3600 clusters into production soon, and we’ve had them for about 6 months in boxes. This presented a fairly significant issue, one that I didn’t think about until it smacked me in the face. The code on these boxes was old. Very old. JunOS 9.2 old. No problem, lets just upgrade them to 10.4R something. Wrong. the code that shipped on these boxes was so old, and we waited so long to upgrade them that I was unable to upgrade them straight to anything modern.

I was recently helping my brother-in-law out with the new Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3 TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drivehe had purchased to do time machine backups on his mac. I personally have the 2t version and have been pretty happy with it, save for one small incident that I think was my fault that required some basic data recovery. Since the drive comes in a file system that is not HFS+ Journaled, it needed to be reformatted to support time machine backups.

Regardless of the fact that there is now a good ISSU-like service for the SRX (named Low-Impact Cluster Upgrade; LICU for short), if you’re upgrading your Active/Active cluster from something that isn’t 10.4, or if you just aren’t comfortable with how baked LICU actually is, you’ll need to know how to move the junos code around. This is easy if you have physical access to both nodes, but for those that have.

I recently needed to upgrade a few MX480 routers and decided that it would be a good opportunity to get some experience with Juniper’s in service software upgrade. I’d read a bit about it but I’d not had the chance to really use it. It’s pretty straightforward and it does what it claims. The following are my notes from rolling through this on my test lab MX480. A few things are necessary to get going with ISSU, first and foremost, you need to have a box with two routing engines.

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At the 2010 Supercomputing conference this year, one of my tasks was to get RANCID working on the Alcatel Lucent 77xx series. for some this may have been a simple task, but for me, a self taught and inefficient programmer, it was something that took some time. The Alcatel Lucent boxes were good performers, but their CLI is pretty awful. The prompt changes based on having unsaved configuration items, and can contain things liks an asterisk.

After enabling the IPv6 Flow based processing, we decided to get rolling with making our IPv6 path congruent with everything else (IPv4 unicast and multicast). With all of the other things we had going on, we thought this would be a low hanging fruit that would be easily plucked from the routing tree. Well, a minor oversight on our part caught us by surprise. According to this handy dandy matrix for JunOS 10.

D.C. - Sep 4, 2011 Question…was this enabled on the cluster? If so are you enabling PIM/IGMP on the reth interfaces or just on the physical ones? Thanks, D.C. Nick Buraglio - Sep 6, 2011 It is enabled on the cluster. We have no Reth interfaces, it’s all in active/active. Chris A. - Oct 3, 2011 Thanks. I’am sure our professional services team can take this knowledge and apply it in the field.