Routing

I’m an awful sysadmin.  Running services permanently isn’t really my forte, I tend to lean more on the “I’ll get this proof of concept all working, prove that it works or doesn’t, then roll it on for polishing by someone else” kinda guy.  That final 15% is something I’m constantly working to refine and better myself at accomplishing.   I’m decent at debugging network services, and can be handy in a “oh crap, it’s down!” scamerio,…

Let me save you some time….Microflow Policing on the Catalyst 6500 / Sup2TXL doesn’t yet work. Inbound it “kinda works”.  You can configure it and it applies as a service policy, but even though outbound is “supported in hardware on the Supervisor2TXL”, there is no software support for it in either the 15.0SY or 12.2(50)SY.  It took me a month to suss this out…..
Yes, I should have suspected.  I dont work on Cisco every day, I have Juniper MX, Brocade…

     I’ve been doing research, carrier and service provider networking for a long time.  I my first real service provider experience was beta testing DSL for GTE back in the 1990s, I prototyped and proposed a CLEC for an employer in 1998 and went to work for the only ISP in the area rolling it’s own DSL over ATM in early 2000.
    Everything seems to come full circle, though, given enough time.  Right now I’m working on many projects, but two of them jumped out as particularly…

Lets just say, for instance, that you have an MX series router at somewhere on your network. Lets also say that said router is carved into more than just the main logical system. For the sake of this writing, lets say that your eBGP sessions are in the default logical system and your IGP is in the logical system, lets call it “internal”.
 JunOS has some wonderful mechanisms for keeping things running, one is called NSR (Non Stop Routing), the other is called ISSU (In Service Software…

I did some minor tweaking to the Alcatel Lucent RANCID scripts and some modifications to make RANCID work under my pfsense environment (originally m0n0rancid code from John Skopis). Since I don’t really do much dev work and am not interested in maintaing a box do be an SVN server for the public, I threw it up onto google code.
I’ll be adding a brief how-to on making RANCID work with pfSense as soon as I get some time.

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.

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. The configuration file also displays the # symbol, a…