Please don't ask me “internal” questions

Every now and then I get a question asking about information that is clearly Cisco-internal, for example:

Hello Ivan!

Can you share some information about this IOS:

  • CallGen - bulk call generator
  • Pagent - Packet Generator

I don't know where to get these images and how to get the License Key for Pagent.

Questions like this should always be directed to your Cisco contacts (try the non-support channels, the always overloaded TAC team usually cannot help you). Even if I had the Cisco-internal information you're looking for, I'm bound by so many Non-Disclosure Agreements that I couldn't share it with you.

3 comments:

Xavier said...

"always overloaded TAC" : you just broke the TAC NDA !! :-)

There are free and open alternatives to our internal tools. Just use scapy instead of pagent/tgn for example.

Ivan Pepelnjak said...

I never got a documentation marked "confidential" saying TAC is overloaded :))

Thanks for the Scapy link, looks like a really useful tool. We wanted to use PCs for packet generators in remote labs for quite a while, but somehow never found time to investigate the tools out there. Any idea what a suitable replacement for callgen might be?

On the negative side, looks like I'll have yet another scripting language to learn. I though PERL, ASP, PHP and Tcl would be enough ... but scapy is written in Python :((

Anonymous said...

A TCL based packet generation tool is available and is called netexpect. As the name suggests it's basically expect for packets. I.e. you send a packet and expect a response. Unfortunately the wiki is currently down for "repairs" but you can get the source which has examples and documentation from here:

http://www.netexpect.org/downloads/