routing and switching | IPNET

Two CCIE R&S Certification Webinars

Source: https://cisco.hosted.jivesoftware.com/docs/DOC-4862

Cisco will conduct two webinar events on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 to describe recent enhancements to CCIE R&S certification and Cisco 360 Learning Program for CCIE R&S.
Attendees can choose from calls at 8:00 am and 7:00 pm PST.
Participants need only attend one event as content will be identical.

Registration information is as follows:

MEETING DETAILS

Meeting Name:	CCIE R&S Refresh
Date/Time:	5/20/2009 @ 8:00 AM and 7:00PM US/Pacific Time
Length:	90 minutes
Frequency:	Once
Meeting ID:	222333

Register for each event:

Please visit https://cisco.hosted.jivesoftware.com/docs/DOC-4862 to register for this event.

Join the Voice Conference

1. Call MeetingPlace:

Toll-free (US only): 1-800-370-2618

Toll-free (Canada only): 1-800-370-2618

International Direct Dial: 1-650-599-0315

2. Press 1 to attend a meeting.

3. Enter Meeting ID (222333) followed by the # key.

4. Follow the prompts to record your name and enter the meeting.

Join the Web Conference

1. Disable any pop-up blocker software.

2. Go to http://gc46gw1.meetingplace.net.

3. Enter meeting ID (222333) and click Attend Meeting.

4. Enter your first and last name in the My name is box and click Attend Meeting.

5. Answer Yes to any security warnings you receive and wait for the Meeting Room to initialize.

How to monitor IP SLA with free tools

Lately I saw an increasing interest for IP SLA monitor and analyze of the data output. I believe that you already know that you can do IP SLA monitor with a lot of tools from the most expensive ones which include support and assistance to the free ones like MRTG or RRDTOOL. From the statistics that I have, more than 50% of the network engineers interested in this tools have a problem either with the money (low budget or the on and on “we do not have money this year for that investment” ) or making free tools actually work and report accurate data.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from SolarWinds that announce me about their FREE IP SLA monitor tool. Usually I ignore such e-mails as for most of them there is always a catch, but since it was from a company that made me a very good impression over the year by offering exactly what’s specified in the advertisement, I said that I should give it a try. Before I present this to you, let’s make something clear. This is not a commercial post, e.g. post to be pay or another things like that. I do not have time and I don’t want to do such stuff of my blog, but when some product really worth to be tried I think that the development company deserve to be specified.

Since it’s a free tool don’t expect to have all the features of the one which you are paying for it, but compared to the headache of implementing other free tools (MRTG, RRDTOOL) you’ll find this one to be piece of cake. Everybody who has an idea about networking can use this without any problems. Configuration is as simplest as it can be. You have to choose the destination IP or hostname to monitor then pick the monitor service and polish some parameters to your particular network. That’s it! One particular issue to me is that this tool is working only from Windows.

Please have a look below to see how to configure this:

Cisco: Quick IOS check in 4 simple steps

This post is rather for the beginners in Cisco’s world than for advance professionals, but still I encounter situation when IOS image was corrupted even if it was uploaded to the device by a network guru. Why? It’s quite simple! Because you can be the master of the Cisco networking, but still sometime you cannot control the device behavior or the transport of the packets to destination.

The problems is that in case of a corrupted IOS image being uploaded on a Cisco device, and having that device reloaded you can run into situation when it will not boot up anymore. When the device is in front of you, or on your desk, there is not a problem, because you can troubleshoot, find the issue (e.g wrong or corrupted IOS image) and solve it! But, what if your device is at 5000 km distance, it is 3:00 AM and you have no professional help on that location?! That’s one ugly situation and the reason for which I always insist to verify the IOS image after it is uploaded and ready to go into production.

For those of you who are dealing with this stuff everyday, this post may seem like a joke, but I bet that there are out there IT’s which never check this stuff or they are beginners and don’t know how to do it. It’s more simple that you may think it is, make you spend about 4-5 minutes for a full check, but can spare you for bigger problems in the future.

So, what are the 4 steps:
1. Check what Cisco device you have (to know what IOS image you need)
2. Check what IOS image Cisco device has (to know what IOS release to download)
3. Verify the IOS image
4. Check the results of your verification
As simplest as it can get.

Please check the tutorial by clicking the image below:

For those who cannot see a Flash movie, please read this text file, that consist of the command you should perform for IOS checking.

Cisco: How-to get notifications for IP SLA monitor using EEM

In some previous post, I explained how to configure a basic IP SLA monitor for checking the round-trip time between two Cisco routers. Because in the comments of that post I have been asked how you can get e-mail notification for IP SLA monitor, I have decided to write another post to extend a little bit this topic.

To accomplish e-mail notification for IP SLA monitors we will use Embedded Event Manager (EEM) and some SNMP knowledge.Cisco IOS EEM is a powerful device and system management technology integrated into specific Cisco switches and routers. EEM gives us the ability to customize Cisco IOS behavior based on network events as they happen.

EEM will use a SNMP event to report anomalies in regarding the RTT threshold value. For SNMP to work we need to know and Object name and the OID associated with it. In my example I will use the SNMP Object name: rttMonCtrlOperOverThresholdOccurred (OID: 1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.42.1.2.9.1.7). On Cisco website you can find more about this SNMP Object and I advice you to read it before going on with this tutorial.

Below you have a basic example about how to get e-mail notification when the threshold of the RTT IP SLA monitor is reached. More examples you can find on Ivan Pepelnjak’s blog: blog.ioshints.info . It’s a good idea to check them also.

The topology remains the same like in the previous post about IP SLA. You can check it here. Please click below to check the tutorial:

If you cannot check the tutorial above, please read this text file, as it contains all the information from the video presentation.

Cisco: FWSM CPU stress test how-to

Sometime ago I had to do a stress test for a Cisco FWSM (Firewall Service Module) to see how the resources are consumed and if some potential traffic can temporarly affect the behavior of this device. For those of you who have don’t know what is a Cisco FWSM, here comes the definition: “Cisco Firewall Services Module (FWSM)—a high-speed, integrated firewall module for Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches and Cisco 7600 Series routers—provides the fastest firewall data rates in the industry: 5-Gbps throughput, 100,000 CPS, and 1M concurrent connections”.

Since I didn’t had a hardware packets generator, I had to use a software one: IPerf . This is a tool that measure the maximum TCP or UDP bandwidth performance. Iperf allows the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss.Also it can run under Linux, Mac and Windows so the platform shouldn’t be a problem for you. As i said before, I used for testing my notebook as packet generator and a Linux server with DNS service enable as destination. Every packet from source (notebook) to destination (DNS server) was passing through FWSM, where it was inspect at OSI Layer 7 (DNS Application). Please check the topology file to have an idea about the configuration. Please be aware that if the packets (in our case DNS) are not to be inspected by FWSM, than the resource utilization of the FWSM is not so high, even in case of big traffic flow.

Please have a look below for the video presentation of the tutorial:

If you cannot see the video tutorial above, please check this text file which present in text mode everything needed to configure to do a stress test tool.