Recently I went through troubleshooting of Site-to-Site Layer-2 link. One of the things we did during troubleshooting of that link was checking interface statistics for interfaces which were connecting two geographical sites together.
Below quick overview how ot check and reset port statistics if required during troubleshooting process.
VMware Workstation and GNS3 are two platforms which are very handy to test and evaluate solutions before live implementation. By default each of those platforms is separate, however both have components which allow integration. What that means is that it is possible to have virtual machines hosted on VMware Workstation to communicate with Cisco equipment which is running oin GNS3.
By default VMware Workstation has 10 virtual networks which are named VMnet0, VMnet1, … , VMnet9. Each of those networks can be used as:
Configuration of virtual networks is flexible and can be adjusted easily. Each of virtual networks can be also presented on host computer as network adapter.
In GNS3 environment we have Cloud Node Type which can be configured to communicate with any network adapter installed on the computer on which GNS3 is running
This is simple Lab environment I built when was working on IPsec VPN tunnel between our internal network environment and 3rd party vendor systems. As we had some issues with establishing IPsec communication, to make sure that everything is fine on my side I start replicating live environment in Lab. To build test environment quick I use GNS3 as platform to run Dynamips hypervisor for IOS. That speeds up whole process of preparation and testing.
In this article you can find description of parameters in rancid.conf. By changing parameters in this file you can impact the way RANCID will behave, collect and process collected information. You can also define type of version control repository and email notifications as well as many other option.
RANCID is a great automation tool which allows you to collect configuration from network devices and store in repository with version control (CVS or SVN). In this article I will show you how to install RANCID and prepare to work on openSUSE 11.4 with subversion as repository for configs.
Having repository with network devices configuration might be also part of disaster recovery planning as in case of failure it will be easy to pull recent configuration from repository and apply on replacement router or switch.
To demonstrate commands I’m using copy&paste from PuTTY while executing step-by-step what is described in this article.
