Project ISP[4]: CCNA commands applied [Part1]

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Finished applying CCNA commands to the ISP HQ network. The book I used was from the book CCNA Portable Command Guide, 2nd Edition. I didn’t have any RIP, EIGRP, HDLC, FR networks, so I didn’t apply them. All the routers (except the other ISP’s and Peers) are in OSPF area 0. That’ll likely change once I move on to CCNP.

Total routers/switches sofar: 53

Project ISP[2]: Network Diagrams

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Finished some network diagrams for this project. This is a very simplified ISP (headquarters) model, but I’ll add things as I read more books. E.g. BGP, MPLS, VoIP, POTS, ATM, Security, etc, etc.

 

Raspberry Pi and IPFire

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I got myself a Raspberri Pi, model B (512 MB RAM) and installed IPFire on it. I’m using the Pi as a personal firewall and learning tool.

RPi_setup

 

I tried turning on IDS, Proxy, Content filters, but the Pi would crash after a day or so. I’m awaiting a stronger USB power supply to see if that helps. Installation wasn’t straight-forward and required some manual intervention. I wrote some installation notes about it.

Project ISP[1]: IP addressing

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Added IP addressing and basic OSPF (just some network commands). All the routers/switches are in Area 0 for now. Verified end-to-end ping connectivity on all routers except the other ISPs and Peers(those shouldn’t run OSPF).

Lessons learned:

  • Duplicate IP addressing leads to > OSP warning about a subnet being re-introduced > OSPF Flooding war > MALLOCFAIL warning (ran out of memory).
  • The virtual switches that were used didn’t like redundant switch lines, so some of the redundant ones were turned off.

Commands used:

  • interface ethernet0/0
  • ip address
  • no shut
  • router ospf 1
  • network 10.0.0.1 0.0.0.3 area 0
  • switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
  • switchport mode trunk
  • switchport host
  • A few commands to set up a Bridged Virtual Interface on the router that’s pretending to be a firewall.
  • Added password ‘cisco’ to the VTY lines
  • ping

Show commands used:

  • show ip interface brief
  • show ip route
  • show ip ospf neighbors
  • show interface summary
  • show interface stats
  • show proc memory [sorted]
  • show vlan brief
  • show spanning-tree

Project ISP[0]: Building your own ISP Lab

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My original plan was to just learn various computer networking topics in order, but I found a more fun way to learn. It’s much more fun to build various labs that reflect actual scenario’s. For example, building a lab that reflects a small ISP and apply various things that I learn to that one lab.

Plan:

  • Build a small ISP lab for internet connection services and VoIP.
  • Apply CCNA commands to the lab (CCNA T&S, Security, Voice)
  • Apply CCNP commands to the lab
  • Apply CCIE commands to the lab
  • Add computers/servers to the lab
  • The above will mostly be virtualized (Virtual Machines, emulators/simulators,)

This is learning process, so it won’t start out perfect. E.g. the design will likely be adjusted later in the future once I need to test more things that can only be achieved with adding more routers/devices.

Here’s a draft of the network that I’m planning to make.

ISP HQ Network Diagram(Draft)

It’s a network diagram of a small ISP HQ. The diagram design comes from an online pdf/lecture. I just re-drew it using another tool and made some modifications. The resources and the details are in the wiki: http://tamwl.users.sonic.net/wiki/doku.php?id=project_isp. I’ll be posting here with updates and general progress.

Update

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Added some more pages to the wiki.

  • Added Network Engineer topics page. I’ll probably keep working on that page and the various topics there.
  • Tried out MediaWiki, but it’s so slow… I can’t seem to enable caching. I’ll come back to it once I can make it fast. The site is under /wiki2.
  • Learning Perl right now.
  • Probably learn some more non-networking stuff for the rest of 2013.