Look for IT over here

I have spent the last 10-15 years working in a predominantly Cisco environment. I think their products are great, but are not cheap. I think it comes down to the old line ‘you get what you pay for’, and Cisco certainly delivers.

That’s at work….. At home I look at alternatives. So when I was looking for open source software/products I found a great open source networking product - Vyatta.

Vyatta is software that runs under a linux base and delivers routing, firewall and VPN functions to the product you have it installed on.

You can get the Vyatta software free (community Edition), but there are paid subscriptions which are for business use. Vyatta also sell networking appliances that have the software on them ready to configure and deploy on your network.

After having a bit of a play with Vyatta myself with the downloadable VMWare image, I must say it doesn’t work too bad. If you have played with a Cisco router, then you’ll find this very easy to configure.

The command set is very similar to Cisco. Viewing the config is a different story, but not too hard to understand if you just take the time to read it.

My recommendation is to try it out yourself, or at least visit the website and read the whitepapers. I’m sure you will find it a very interesting product.

How many times have you typed in the wrong command on a Cisco router, and then have to wait while the DNS lookup times out because the route is trying to resolve that ‘domain’?

Yeah me too. Easy to fix …

Simply enter global configuration mode and type

router(config)# no ip domain-lookup

And the result is no more waiting for the DNS searches to time out.

There’s nothing better than a router sim that has the full Cisco command set available to utilise. All of the router sims (up to now) have a stripped down collection of commands to use.

I stumbled on this website a few weeks ago. It’s an open source product that runs on Windows and Linux boxes, and enables you to simulate multiple routers on the one PC. You can even route real traffic out the ethernet interface of your PC, which takes it past the traditional ‘router sim’ that I am used to. The good thing is that this software supports multiple Cisco routers so it would be perfect for a budding CCNA, CCNP.

I have not tried it as yet as I’m building a PC specifically for this, but a friend of mine told me you need a pretty good PC with a Gig of RAM to make it worthwhile. He runs six instances/routers on his PC.

I would be interested in anyone that has tried this and what their thoughts are.

Forget the default password for a router? Or are you helping a friend with a problem who has no idea about networking - and has called you for assistance?

Check out this site for quite a large list of popular routers and their default passwords.

Routers at a remote location can be safely configured by using a reload command first. Huh? Read on…..

Before any configuration changes are made, issue a reload command to the remote router:

reload in 30 Instructs the router to reboot in 30 minutes.
or
reload at 00:00 to reload at a specific time.

The idea behind this is that if you lock yourself out of the router whilst configuring it (assuming you have NOT saved any changes), the router will reload and you should be able to access the router again.

If your configuration changes are successful, a reload cancel command will stop the pending reload.