Routed Port

Hurricane Electric IPv6 - Almost There

Right, well it seems I'm now a guru. Jolly good. The thing is however, I have always wanted to be a sage. We've set up IPv6 mail servers ( I couldn't get Google to change their policies so I changed my MX record and watched the bytes on the wire), my ISP Powertech (the best ISP in the world) gave my servers PTR records (via IRC on  Sunday, takk skal du ha, Truls!) and now I'm stuck at the Sage level. This is proving to be tricky as DynDNS.org isn't providing  a great deal of support even though I pay for the service, so we'll see how things pan out.

Being stuck at the sage level isn't such a bad thing. Perhaps DynDNS's name servers are a bit wonky, or perhaps I've made a mistake along the way. Either way, if I achieve the sage certification something will have been fixed, or I will have learn't something new, or both. Regardless of the outcome, something or someone will have benefitted.

The long and short of it though is that this HE Certification is about the nuts and bolts of IPv6. Teaching people, free of charge, how the Internet is bolted together and how it should be bolted together with IPv6. It also exposes many loose nuts, and in some cases, a complete lack of them altogether.

The more people who complete the certification, the more the internet will be able to handle what what is invetitably an increase of IPv6 traffic.

Give the cert a try at Hurricane Electric

IPv6 Conference in Oslo

Last week in Oslo, April 24th and 25th, IPv6Forum Norway help and IPv6 Confernce at which I spoke. Hopefully the vidoes of presentations will be posted soon at the URL below.

IPv6 and Windows 7 Wireless Bridge Anamoly

I've been trying to get my corporate laptop with Windows 7 to get onboard this IPv6 thing people keep mentioning, but to no avail. My entire network at home is dual-stacked and I have a native IPv6 connection to my ISP and my girlfriend's Vista works fine, as does all my Cisco lab kit and my Linux laptop and server. I use SLAAC (stateless auto-configuration) as I do not have an IPv6 DHCP capable device at home.

N.B. I'm not a Windows lad. Any tips, corrections, pointers etc are more than welcome.

The Problem

Simple: I couldn't receive any RA (router advertisements) from my router and I saw no RS (router solicitations) coming from my bridged wireless interface. As such, I only had a link-local address.

SDN : Google is running Openflow

Seems like Google have beaten the world to  it  again. Wired has an article of Goole using Openflow. Looks very interesting.

And have a look at this forum post which has a look at a no-name switch which claims to have Google MAC addresses.

Cisco Policy Routing with EEM

I was recently tasked with improving a design for a branch office setup. The setup involves virtuals servers, virtual firewalls and virtual WAN accelerators. The problem that was being seen was two fold;

• A layer 2 connection from the WAN Router to the Firewall. This meant that if the firewall failed, we had no access to the mgmt network
• If the WAN accelerator failed, all traffic to or from the site was black-holed

Proposed Solution

I decided that we needed to solve the two aforemention issues. First, let's use layer 3, and second, let's use some way of detecting if the WAN accelerator fails.

I immediately thought we could simply use a route-map, policy-routing, ip sla and track availability. Much to my dismay however, I discovered the 12.4 IP Services on a Cisco 3560 doesn't support track availability in the set command in route-maps. I banged my head a few times and thought, well, let's give Cisco's EEM (Embedded Event Manager) a go.

Network Diagram

Network Design Proposal

In the above diagram, the Cisco 3560 is the site's router. With this layer 3 solution, if the firewall dies, we can still access the management network which includes other network devices and critically, the VSX Servers.

A Simple Cisco Fabricpath Test

I'm sitting here in the middle of the night (it's now 06:22) waiting for a provider to do some routing in their network to route some traffic over a satellite link. So I thought I might briefly reflect on a Fabricpath test I did this week with four Cisco  Nexus 5596 devices.

Test Scenario

As you can see, it's not a full mesh between the Nexus switches. It will be in further tests, but this was a pure functiona test, i.e. does it work and will there be any packet loss if I start pulling cables during a continous ping?

Host A and Host B are in the same subnet connected to Nexus 2248 FEXs. Fabricpath has been configured on all the links interconnecting the Nexus 5596s . The single links between the Nexus 5596s represent a data centre interconnect (DCI) utilising dark fibre (actual distance will be around 10km).

Test

Ping Host B  continuously from Host A and unplug any redundant cable.

IPv6Forum Certified Silver Engineer

On the 5th April, 2012 I received an E-Mail from the IPv6 Forum informing me that my application for the IPv6 Silver Certified Engineer was successful. This means that I am free to use the logo on the left on my website, blog, publications etc. It also means that the IPv6 Forum recognises that I have a certain set of skills and knowledge pertaining to IPv6. More importantly however, IPv6 Forum is helping people like me to publicise IPv6 and further its momentum around the globe.

On my part, www.cunningtek.com is both available on IPv4 and IPv6. If you query an IPv6 capable DNS server, you should see a AAAA record for wintermute.cunningtek.com to which www.cunningtek.com points.

Welcome to Routed Port

Good day and welcome to Routed Port, the blog of  Conor Cunningham and IT networking consulting company Cunningtek. After working in the IT/Networking/Linux world for 12 years, and after dabbling with blogs and hosting my own servers I've decided to get serious about my blog. Serious in the sense that I should share my knowledge with others for the purpose of continuing my learning and with any luck, help others along the way.

I'm a certified CCNP R&S, CCNA Security and IPv6 Forum Gold Certified Engineer. 

I'm currently building a data centre for a large global company based in Oslo, Norway and a new data centre for the same company in Kuala Lumpur.

I've been working a lot with Fabricpath and Cisco Nexus of late, so don't be surprised if a lot of the blogs feature such technology.

If you are interesting in getting in contact, professionally or otherwise, pop over to www.cunningtek.com