Tag: configuration

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 […]

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.

Windows NPS Radius Authentication of Cisco Prime Infrastructure

As part of a recent network upgrade I was able to get Cisco Prime Infrastructure included in the moneys for the project. I love new systems to play with, of course, and immediately got to work checking out all the bells and whistles. Needless to say, it wasn’t long until I got tired of remembering the root credentials and began looking at RADIUS authentication for some help. Additionally, I’m kind of the security guy too and knew I was breaking my own rules by not having individual user logons in place.

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.