Bug in EEM SNMP event detector

Jared Valentine found an interesting bug in the EEM’s SNMP event detector: if you’re triggering your EEM applet when the increment of an SNMP variable exceeds the threshold, you cannot re-arm the applet; the exit-type increment does not work. He fixed the problem with a somewhat more convoluted approach:

• The first EEM applet reads the SNMP variable, waits a second, does a second read and stores the difference in a counter.
• The second EEM applet is triggered based on the counter values.

I’m collecting tips like this one in the Embedded Event Manager (EEM) workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop; we can also organize a dedicated event for your networking team.

Here’s the source code for the first applet (he had to execute CLI show commands to work around the CB-QoS MIB limitations).

Less than 15 days left till Market Trends in Service Provider Networks presentation

There are only a few places left in the Market Trends in Service Provider Networks virtual classroom on February 11th. If you’d like to attend, register ASAP.

More information:

• Detailed workshop description
• Delivery method and client requirements
• Registration page

Update: workaround for sluggish CB-QoS MIB

More than a year ago, I wrote about the very slow update rate of the variables in the CB-QoS MIB. In August WB found a workaround (do a show policy-map interface before reading the counters) and now Jared has tested it and confirmed that it works. He’s configured a simple EEM applet that executes the show command once per second:

event manager applet UpdateMibTables 
event timer watchdog time 1 
action 1.0 cli command "enable" 
action 2.0 cli command "show policy-map int dialer0" 

With this fix, he can use the SNMP variables in other EEM applets to detect VoIP calls within 1-2 seconds.

Don’t forget: numerous EEM topics are described in the Embedded Event Manager (EEM) workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop; we can also organize a dedicated event for your networking team.

IPv6 CPE router requirements

It’s almost unbelievable: more than 10 years after the IPv6 specs have been completed, someone finally realized it would be a good idea to specify the minimum requirements for a decent IPv6 CPE router. While this document will not solve the lack of low-cost IPv6-ready CPE devices, it’s definitely a step in the right direction, more so as it clearly acknowledges the need for DHCPv6 (some people still believe SLAAC is the solution to every problem ever invented).

You will find an overview of the Service Provider-related IPv6 challenges in my Market trends in Service Provider networks workshop (register for the online webinar). Advanced backbone designs and configurations are explained in the Building IPv6 Service Provider core workshop (register for the online webinar).

Here are a few highlights from the document:

IP over DWDM

A while ago I was pushed (actually it was a kind nudge) into another interesting technology area: optical networks, with emphasis on IP over DWDM. I realized almost immediately that I’d encountered another huge can of worms. A few issues you can stumble across when trying to plug routers or switches directly into DWDM networks are documented in my IP over dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM): Metro and core issues article recently published by SearchTelecom.com.

Cloud computing and public transport

Greg Ferro has republished an older post in which he compares Cloud Computing with public transport (and notes that nothing has changed in more than a year since he wrote the original article). His analogy is more than fitting; a perfect example is Google’s new Google Docs offering, where Stephen Foskett did a nice cost analysis of the unsupported service as compared to supported one.

I’m describing aspects of cloud computing in its various incarnations in my Next-generation IP Services workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop or we can organize a dedicated event for your team.

Translated into public transport terms: if you want to fly cheap, choose Ryan Air (in Google’s case, you pay 25 cents per gigabyte per year); if you want reasonable support and flexibility, use Lufthansa ($3.50 per gigabyte per year for Google Apps Premier Edition customers or 14 times more than the unsupported capacity).

If you’re unhappy with my choice of airlines, insert your own selection in the above paragraph ;)

NAT-PT is totally broken in late IOS releases

When the current variant of IPv6 was selected 15 years ago, seamless integration with IPv4 was a big deal, resulting in NAT-PT architecture. NAT-PT tried to solve too many problems and (as I pointed out in my IPv6 Deployment workshop), while the 6to4 NAT is manageable, the 4to6 NAT is horrific (NAT64 and DNS64 are more reasonable; more about them in an upcoming post).

NAT between IPv4 and IPv6 hosts is just one of the topics covered in the Enterprise IPv6 Deployment workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop or we can organize a dedicated event for your team.

To make matters worse, the NAT-PT implemented in Cisco IOS is totally broken due to removal of fast switching support in IOS release 12.4(20)T and numerous other releases. As I wrote a year and a half ago, removing fast switching will bite us eventually … and so it does when you try to use NAT-PT.

Rant: The long-term consequences of book piracy

A few hours after I’ve published my review of the “Cisco routers for the desperate” book someone posted a link to a digital (pirated) copy of the book to my Facebook page, no doubt feeling like a hero fighting for the freedom of information (or some similar nonsense).

I didn’t even try to download the book to see whether it was a leaked copy from the publisher (in which case someone has some serious problems) or a scanned PDF.

Weird GPRS and UMTS latency

Bad designer wrote an interesting comment to my yesterday’s post: 2G and 3G networks have huge latency issues. As Stefan reported almost a year ago, GPRS is intolerable, UMTS is awful and HSPDA is reasonable but still not what one would hope for.

The latency does not seem to be associated with serialization delay. UMTS gives you reasonable transfer rates and significant latency and GPRS gives you an order of magnitude higher latency than ISDN with comparable transfer rate. If anyone knows enough about the mobile technologies to explain this phenomenon (or at least give me useful pointers) I’d really appreciate your comments.

Wireless generations

Are you lost in the immense generational marketing hype surrounding wireless technologies? Robert Lesar, one of our top CCIEs, finally had enough and decided to classify various wireless technologies in terms that anyone can understand. The result: the “First-Mile Wireless” IP Corner article.

OSPF flooding filters in hub-and-spoke environment

Almost all articles describing DMVPN in combination with OSPF use the “magic” ip ospf database-filter all out command on the hub routers to minimize the OSPF traffic traversing the DMVPN part of the network.

The same trick can be used in any hub-and-spoke network, including Frame Relay-based networks.

What these articles usually fail to tell you is the true impact of this command: it stops all OSPF flooding from hub router. The spoke routers receive no OSPF information whatsoever; to establish connectivity to the network core, you have to use static default routes on the hubspoke routers.

I’ve described the details of OSPF flooding filters and their use in hub-and-spoke networks in the “OSPF flooding filters in hub-and-spoke environment” article in the CT3 wiki.

Add vendor-specific MIBs to Wireshark

When I was testing EEM SNMP integration, I wanted to decode the SNMP traps sent by the router with Wireshark. Wireshark performed wonderfully, but could not decode the Cisco-specific object IDs used in the traps. I knew I had to download Cisco-specific MIB files and install them in Wireshark, but doing that proved a bit harder than expected … and the Wireshark and NetSNMP documentation was not too helpful.

EEM-SNMP integration is described in the Embedded Event Manager (EEM) workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop; we can also organize a dedicated event for your networking team.

You can find the final results of my struggles in the “Add MIB files to Wireshark SNMP decoder” article in the CT3 wiki.

Most visited topics in 2009

Try to guess: how many of the posts I wrote in 2009 have made it to the top-10 most visited blog page list? The answer is surprising: just one (the “Cisco VPN client on Windows 7” post I’ve already mentioned); eight out of ten most popular posts were written in 2007. Here’s the list of the most visited pages in my blog (apart from the home page, which got close to 200.000 pageviews throughout the year):

The best of 2009

I never imagined that the best-visited post written in 2009 (according to Google Analytics) would be Cisco VPN client in 64-bit Windows 7, which got almost 10 times as many pageviews as the next one (IOS fossils: OSPF-to-BGP redistribution). The other top-10 posts were:

• The tunneling Kool-Aid
• Online network diagram drawing tool
• Oversized AS paths: Cisco IOS bug details
• Quick tip: VLAN interface status
• Inter-VRF static routes
• Connecting a switch to itself: does it hurt?
• Display all parts of a VRF configuration
• Rate-limiting inbound traffic on DSL