The New Scary Trend Happening in Russia

The New Scary Trend Happening in Russia

We’ve just changed our Cisco 2911 to Mikrotik 1100 on one of our sites. And it’s happening with all Russian ISPs. They are migrating to Mikrotik because it is cheap, powerful and easy. Otherwise, Cisco is expensive and cisco professionals are expensive too 😉  As for me, it is scary enough…

Switchport Configurations Explained

Switchport Configurations Explained

 

Originaly it was posted by Brad Hedlund.

It always helps me to think of the English translation when trying to memorize and understand some the Cisco IOS settings I think are important.

Here are some Cisco IOS switchport configurations translated into English:

switchport mode trunk says: “Always trunk on this end, and I will send DTP to attempt to negotiate a trunk on the other end.”

switchport nonegotiate says: “Do not send or respond to DTP from this end. Disable all DTP on this port.” (Best used on user access ports, when trunking to non-Cisco switches, when trunking to a router[1], or if you are paranoid about fast convergence[2])

switchport mode dynamic desirable says: “Ask the other end to trunk using DTP and trunk if the negotiation succeeds. If DTP negotiation fails then become an access port.”

switchport mode dynamic auto says: “If the other end asks me to be a trunk with DTP, then become a trunk, but I wont initiate any negotitation from this end. If no one asks me to become a trunk then I will become an access port.”

switchport mode access says: “Never trunk on this end, and I will send out DTP to help my link partner reach the same conclusion.”

switchport trunk encapsulation says: “Do not negotiate the trunk protocol with DTP. Only use the trunk protocol specified in this command (isl or dot1q).

[1] Cisco routers do not talk DTP

[2] The process of DTP message exchange adds some delay in negotiating and bringing up a trunk. Use ‘switchport mode trunk’ + ‘switchport nonegotiate’ + ‘switchport trunk encapsulation’ for the fastest possible formation of a trunk.

Routes via DHCP

Routes via DHCP

Basically, this is a very old post. Originally it was posted in my old Russian blog in early 2012. Nevertheless, I hope it might be useful.

When I was working in the University we used PPTP VPN servers to let our staff access Internet. Computers got default gateway from VPN server and it was a real problem due to the fact that we had a lot of internal servers and different subnets so that gateway was unique for each building. To address this problem our system administrators had to add routes on every computer manually.

Possible solutions were to distribute routes thought DHCP-server.
At that time we used Cisco 4503E as a default gateway and DHCP server.

Routes are controlled by 249 DHCP option, for example, option 249 ip (network) (mask) (gateway).

There is RFC http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/52/I-D/draft-ietf-dhc-csr-06.txt

Unfortunately, it didn’t work /23 and /8 networks…windows computers just ignored them.

Lately, I realized, that it was possible to send option 249 in HEX format.

For instance:

route 172.172.0.0/21 168.168.168.168
write hex:
N byte: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
hex: 15 AC AC 00 A8 A8 A8 A8

description:
byte 1 – mask in hex (21dec -> 15 hex)
byte from 2 to 4 – our network
bytes from 5 to 8 – gateway

in configuration:
!
ip dhcp pool POOL
….
option 249 hex 15ACAC00A8A8A8A8
….
!

Actually, I found the script below to calculate HEX format for 249 option: