Observium the new, new.

I recently installed observium in work to try to get a overview of how the status was  of our routers.
I was amazed how easy it was and how little I had to configure to get all the needed information from the devices.
Currently we monitor, Fortigates, Extreme Junpier old Cisco etc.
All network equipment is monitored like a breeze in the wind lying down on a hot summer day.
I urge everyone to test it out and if you like it contribute with a small amount or just your liking.

SPBm

SPBM ( 802.1aq )

Nothing recently has had me so intrested in ethernet techonolgy like SPBM, with the recent release of

7.3.1.R01 ( Alcatel Lucent) that supports SPBm, the only wonder I have about this is how many ISID does the hardware/software support today ? How well will it scale in a ethernet carrier environment ? 

Currently I'm trying to get ahold of units to test this on.

ERPS

EAPS version 4 or 5 ?

This is something I was demoed last year in autum when I visited the Extreme Networks headquarters in the valley.
I was very impressed with the ability to build ladders on ladders, however there is one big scalability issue that I see, you have to have the "control" vlan spann over several ladders if you where to build a ladder on ladder topology.
This makes me believe that while this technology is very good, and has som improvements over EAPS

1. Ability to "test" your rings without disable enable a port
2. No more shared-port limitations.

However something else have to be put in place to extend the ethernet services beyond metro small wan area.

802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging

I was listening to the always interesting packetpushers podcast the other day, one thing caught my attention.
SPB or 802.1aq, this is what PPB should have been from the first time.

A protocol that builds a loop free l2 topology based on mac addresses with ISIS as the topology protocol.
There are two flavours of SBP
SPBV and SPBM
SPBV 
Enables you to transport VID ( VLAN ID ) over the shortest path in the SPB core. This retains the capabilities and functionality with normal switching environments. This version of SPB would fit well in a large datacenter or even across datacenters, or smaller metro areas.
SPBM
Leverages the capabilities of PBB ( Mac-in-Mac), as it should have been =).
What it does is essentially encapsulate the mac in another mac and send it across the SPB core. This way the core devices never have to learn the mac address of the client.
The primary use for this would be carrier ethernet services, E-LAN, E-LINE etc.

I'm really looking forward to see this in action and to see more vendors supporting this.
Apparently both Nortel (avaya), Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei have products supporting this.

More info can be found at
Wikipedia
Packetpusher podcast

Extreme CEP

So this nice new feature was snuck into code 12.6, What does it do ? And who is it good for ?


You can have a s-tag vlan ( vman in extreme ) and you can look at the ingress packets coming in from your end cpe ( cheap broadband router), you can then based on the port it comes in to either translate this to another s-tag and encapsulate the c-tag and send it over your PB transport vlan.

You could also translate thoose c-tags to another c-tag on the other end. This makes it usefull if you have for say two providers on the same metroswitch that sends you the same c-tags and you have to bring the out on the same port on the other end .

The functionality I missed in this is the ability to translate s-tag id to another s-tag id. That would help in the case where you have NNI towards other pure ethernet operators.

DDMI!

What is the problem with DDMI for Extreme ? We have been talking about this feature for three years now and and we have been told that it would be released in a later XOS version. All of a sudden the major platform the last three years, Summit series doesn't support it in hardware. HOW ? They didn't knew that three years ago what hardware they had ?

Stacking Extreme Switches.

One thing that puzzles me is the way coders choose to implement different type of scripts/codes in software.
Recently we have been converting a lot of standalone Extreme Summit families switches to stack. That procedure involves a command that is
enable stacking.
It sets all the needed parameters and reboots the switch. Fair enough.
However it also wipes out the configuration? Why? Ohh there is some magic stuff in the configuration that we can't keep or is totally changed.
Hmm I diffed the two files and found out that the only major difference is the port numbering. So when I edited the ports to X:X instead of X and reloaded the switch with the "none" stacking configuration it all worked. Why ohh why couldn't this be default..... Or maybe something is eluding me?