Tag Archives: IOS

Administering EtherChannels

EtherChannels, Port-Channels, or Link Aggregation on Cisco switches is a popular and practical feature.  This allows additional capacity to be added to your network without upgrading hardware.  Unfortunately, however, it’s not hard to get confused or to cause an accidental network disruption when working with this feature. Before getting down in the weeds with the configuration, let’s look at the topology we will be working with: Configuration We have two switches.  In this case they are connected with two trunk ports each trunking VLAN 100.  Spanning tree is working as expected and one of the ports on SW2 is in … Continue reading

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Cisco Privilege Level Access with Radius and NPS Server

When administering Cisco network gear it’s always nice to be able to login with your typical admin credentials. You change one password and it changes over all systems. It’s not uncommon for organizations of many different sizes to use RADIUS backed up to Active Directory to achieve this.

The simplest setup is typically to allow network admins full access to the CLI and nothing for everyone else. Typically, that works well. I wanted the helpdesk guys to get some Cisco experience, however, while not having the ability to make a bunch of changes. Continue reading

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Power over Ethernet Issues

With the invention of Power over Ethernet (PoE) bringing up light devices such as VOIP phones and wireless access points has become very easy. Power and data flow over the same cable on various wire pairs. The simplicity is great but the electrical requirements are a bit more particular with PoE. With full Gigabit implementations all wire pairs are required for power and for data transmission. When one pair is not properly terminated strange things happen… Continue reading

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Layer 2 to Layer 3 Metro-E Link Migration

Metro Ethernet has made connecting different sites extremely easy for just about any level of admin. The problem is, however, it has also made for some very sloppy setups. It is nearly always a recommended best practice to route WAN links. This is particularly true when the WAN is a bottle neck in terms of throughput. If a LAN is built on Gigabit Ethernet and a Metro-E link between sites is only 40Mbps there is a bottleneck. Often LANs in small to medium sized organizations are way underutilized and this can be gotten away with. Typically the Layer 2 connection would span the 40Mbps link with little trouble. However, as traffic increases, a redundant link is added between sites, or requirements change you can find this design corners you with a need for a better way of controlling traffic flow. Continue reading

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