Tag Archives: networking

Introduction to Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRFs)

If you have listened to anything IT in the past five plus years you have probably heard of and experienced the “virtualization” buzz word. Typically, it’s referencing host or server virtualization as this is the most common and well known. There are, however, other instances where virtualization of sorts can be used to break hardware into isolated network building blocks. Virtual Routing and Forwarding instances (VRFs) on Cisco routing devices are one such example. Continue reading

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Moving a Subnet to a Different VLAN

There are a few different rare cases where you may need to move a subnet to a completely new or different VLAN. Making a layer 2 connection between two different networks with overlapping VLAN space or moving off of VLAN 1 for best practice reasons would be two examples. I will be focusing on the latter in this discussion but the steps will be applicable in other instances as well. To make this more practical lets keep the idea of very little to no downtime in mind. Continue reading

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Traffic Rate Limiting with Monowall

Recently I was called to implement a system to limit the bandwidth used by our guest network. There was no firewall in place for this network aside from the device provided by the ISP. Needless to say, it was junk and supported none of the more advanced features we needed. I implemented a Monowall with a fairly typical setup and jumped into configuring the traffic shaper. In this article I will only be limiting traffic Continue reading

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Backup Cisco Configurations with SSH on Windows

I have done a brief write-up about backing up Cisco IOS configurations over an SSH connections in the past. Unfortunately, this article was based on expect, a Linux utility. There is, however, a similar but simpler way to accomplish the same thing on windows. Continue reading

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