Unfortunately Cisco and Foundry disagree on the definition of a "trunk". Awhile ago I had to find a way to trunk multiple vlans between a Cisco 5000 CatOS and a Foundry BigIron switch. I made a quick call to a Foundry Systems Engineer to find out what was needed to make this happen.

A Nokia CheckPoint Firewall was not receiving OSPF adjacency from a Cisco IOS 12.3 3640 Router. Apparently Cisco released a new feature in 12.3 (and 12.2T) that is ON by default... even though it is NEW. The feature is called, Link-Local Signalling (LLS). LLS confuses OSPF on the Nokia (even though it is RFC compliant) and is consequently rejected.

Recently I configured a router to be part of an MPLS, and it was using BGP for advertising routes with in the MPLS "cloud". By default BGP will advertise routes for interfaces directly attached to the router. Unfortunately I needed to also advertise more subnets that were “behind” the router, than those that were directly attached. I knew there had to be a simple way to add this, and quickly found that I needed a “network” statement in the BGP section of the configuration.

I needed to advertise 172.31.0.0 255.255.0.0 to the rest of the cloud.

Anti-virus and anti-spam protection at the firewall level is a growing trend, often referred to as Unified Threat Management. If you purchase one of the Juniper SSG Series firewalls, you can purchase subscriptions for “built-in” anti-virus and anti-spam UTM. Basically, you are allowed to attach these protections to an existing policy for scanning on inbound/outbound connections.
The anti-spam portion uses a Spam Block List (SBL) which is more commonly known as a Relay Block List (RBL). The SBL/RBL that Juniper offers is updated and maintained by Symantec and contains the Top 100 known spammers.
You can find a sample of the list at: http://www.juniper.net/security/spam/.

While the Top 100 known spammers is a good start, it still allows a lot of spam through which could be stopped/tagged. There is no way to add another SBL/RBL in the web GUI, but there is a hidden command in the CLI which will allow you to add other lists.

Sometimes routing can get tricky in different networking environments. It is not uncommon to be required to add routes to devices such as a F5 Big-IP.

Due to the difference between the interfaces of Cisco's CatOS and IOS, one needs to perform different commands to create a trunk.

I recently needed to setup a way to backup files from a linux workstation to a windows server. I found that the utility, from the Samba project, smbclient was able to be scripted to provide such services. Smbclient acts much like a command line ftp program.

The intent and mission of this site, is to provide short useful tips for people needing technical help. The desire is to provide simple yet helpful articles.

Due to the fact that these will be random technical topics at undetermined intervals, calling the articles "sneeze's" seemed appropriate.

Please feel free to send comments as we begin and continue this adventure!
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TechSneeze.com