I started working on Juniper equipment around 2002. At my employer, we had an M40 with the serial number 256.  We did Layer3 only.  I had no idea if the Juniper even did layer2.  It certainly wasn’t a layer3 switch like a 6500 like I was used to.  It was like a deliciously robust version of any Layer 3 router I’d worked on previously.  Over the years Juniper has added a switching line utilizing their FreeBSD based OS, JunOS. All that being said, I’d never really messed with…

Last year, Networking Field Day was something that I’d heard of but wasn’t really aware of what is really was.  I occasionally looked at Twitter and saw the hash tags but did not know much about how it was set up or what it was about.  In fact, I actually thought it was supposed to be like the HAM radio field day stuff where you go out and build out an emergency network on the fly.  OK, I should have done more homework, admittedly. Fast forward 6 months. I’m working more and…

I’ve recently run into a situation where there was no longer enough space in the FIB to handle both the full IPv4 global table and the full IPv6 global table.  We prefer to run a default-free network within this particular SP network, but in this case, until a hardware refresh can happen, we’ll need to adjust that.  Given what we knew about the size of both tables, it made more sense to take a default IPv6 route from one transit provider and filter the rest.  How we did this…

Recently we encountered a very strange behavior on an SRX 5800 cluster.  The cluster, which is in active/active mode, started dropping OSPF adjacencies to it’s neighboring routing equipment, in this case, Juniper MX480 and Brocade/Foundry MLX8.  Strange behavior indeed, since for us, these had been rock solid for around 2 years and we’d never seen this odd behavior before. Honestly, we started looking at the routers first since this was something the SRX has never done before.  After…

Have you ever needed to replicate a lot of data transparently to an IDS without the use of a rack of optical taps?  Not enough budget for a Gigamon or cPacket?  Have a spare MLXe laying around?  you’re in luck, we were in that boat too. Let me first preface this by saying that this would be fairly trivial using OpenFlow / SDN.  That being said, we didn’t have the time to set that up, so this is what we came with.

   For the Supercomputing 2012 show, as in years past, I was “the guy who installed and maintained RANCID” as part of my duties for the SCinet routing team.   If you don’t know about RANCID for change management and config back up, check the link.  It’s ree and works on a huge amount of gear.  Every year there is a new and interesting platform, this year is was Juniper qfabric and Brocade VDX.  The Juniper qFabric just worked with the existing jrancid pieces.

    Recently we’ve run into an odd issue while routing on an EX4200 series.  These little JunOS boxes are a nice alternative for an entry level building router, they support L2/L3 functionality, a PVST+-ish protocol and, with advanced licensing, IPv6, ISIS and BGP. They have multi 10G interface options and come in a pluggable fiber option.  We use them all over for light layer 3.  They can also be stacked via stacking cables and fiber, which is very handy and makes them extremely versatile…

    Moving to JunOS from IOS can be a daunting task.  It’s a completely different command structure and the config, by default, looks like a programming language.  I was fortunate enough to have gotten in on using JunOS very early in my career, ¹⁄₃ in to be exact (as of this writing).  Not to mention that wen I got started, IOS wasn’t the only game in town.  Remember Xylan?  Gandalf?  OpenRoute? How about Ascend?