Checkpoint – The Gentle SIC Reset

I found myself in a awkward situation the other weekend where I lost access to Check Point’s internal networks after switching over some networks due to anti-spoofing and after a short adventure of spinning up a new management server in Azure, pointing the firewall to it and pushing a more permissive rule I was back online!!!!

However the problem now was that if I reset the SIC to point it back to the old mgmt station it would do a CPSTOP and CPSTART which would unload the happy policy and I would be back offline and no I could not go onsite!
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Phoning it in – Bashing UCOS

When my UC lab blew up I contacted Cisco to get all the licenses reset which they promptly did, but to my absolute horror I found out I gave them the wrong mac address for my UCCX VM!!!!!!!!!!!! Since sending a email to the friendly TAC lady is far to much work and frankly a boring blog topic, let’s instead enable the bash shell in my UCCX and change the mac address to be what I sent them 🙂

Phoning it in – Deploying CUCM

I was planning on finishing the CUCME topics before diving into CUCM but as luck would have it one of my ESX servers blew up so I had to reinstall my CUCM lab and as they say “when life gives you lemons, make a blog post about it.” So today we’ll look at how to install UCOS based servers (CUCM, CUC, CER etc) since the installs are so similar I will just show the publisher and subscriber install for CUCM, then we’ll look adding the servers to Prime Licensing, and we’ll close out with how to do a upgrade!

Phoning it in – CUCME SCCP Basics

This blog series is going to over aspects of Cisco UC and probably a bit of Skype for Business as well for variety.

This first entry will go over registering some phones to a CUCME router with SCCP.

Phoning It In – Unity Express

This short lab in the Phoning it in series will go over the basics of using soft Cisco IP Phones to a Cisco Unity Express router. Since I don’t have a CUE module I’m using a INE rack rental for this. Continue reading

Phoning In it – CUCME with SIP Phones

This short lab in the Phoning it in series will go over the basics of registering some Cisco IP Phones (8841s in my case) to some CUCME routers.

Virtualception – Running VMs off your Router!?!?!

Today’s post will quickly go over a neat feature of IOS-XE that lets you run a virtual machine directly off your Cisco router, the feature is meant for the ASRs and the 4K routers but since CSRs use the same code base we can have a virtual router host a virtual machine! This is different from using a UCS-E blade to run a full blown ESXi install, rather the router uses KVM to directly run the VM, it also supports containers which we’ll play with on some Nexus 9ks.

Rise of the Point and Click – APIC-EM

I have been buried in APIC-EM stuff for awhile and since the new version of the CCNA is adding some APIC-EM topics this September I figured I may as well talk about the solution now so I can shamelessly be ahead of some of the other blogs out there 🙂

The Great Divide – Working with VRFs

This post is going to be a bit of a deep dive of everything VRF-Lite, we’ll go into making VRFs, providing central services, using IOS tools that are VRF aware, and we’ll play a bit with VNET Trunks.

A Over The Top post about EIGRP

It seems like everything being virtualized these days, we have Virtual LANs, Virtual machines, Virtual networks, Virtual storage, Virtual NICs, and now the latest new thing is WAN Virtualization.

Rise of the Fabric(Path) – FabricPath on VIRL

Ever wanted to play around with Cisco’s fancy STP killer but don’t feel like mortgaging your house to buy some Nexus 5 and 7k switches for your lab? Well as it turns out we can use VIRL to play with FabricPath.

That’s a Heavy Load – Generating Routes with Routem

Have you ever wanted your lab to have a bunch of routes because the more the merrier – but don’t feel like making a bunch Loopback networks and also don’t want to write a TCL script etc to make them for you because being lazy is awesome? Well now you can use routem in your VIRL lab to do all the heavy lifting for you.

The CYA – Destructive SSH Changes

Have you ever had to change some configuration over a SSH session? Of course you have! Everyone in networking has to make a remote change every now and then. But what if you have to make a destructive change like changing the WAN IP and default route while connected remotely?
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Permanently Stuck (In Active)

Hi all!

I was watching INE’s EIGRP videos and it put an idea in my head about how it might be possible to use FPM to prevent the EIGRP reply from making it back and therefore forcing things into a SIA state. Since I was bored today (terrible weather out) I did that very thing!

Bashing Cisco – Fun with IOS.sh

Today we’re going to go over a little known shell in IOS that gives us some bash like functionality! It is called IOS.sh

Note: This is a IOS 15 feature.

Keyboard Wizardry – CLI Mastery

Yes yes I haven’t posted in anything in a long time, but hey! I’m back now!

This post will go over some of the handy tips and tricks in the Cisco CLI.

The Undo Button – Cisco Commit Confirmed

Hi All!

I suddenly remembered I had this blog and figured I should make a quick post before I forget.

I’ve been hearing over and over that Cisco really needs to borrow Juniper’s commit confirmed feature, guess what? They have several years ago!

We’re not so different you and I – CCNP Voice

This quick post briefly goes over the differences and similarities between IP routing for data networks and Call routing for VoIP networks.
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RADIUS 101 – So Who are you anyway? – NPS

This series will take us through each of the A’s in AAA through the eyes of a RADIUS server that will service some network devices. Continue reading

What time is it? – Using Windows NTP Servers

This is a quick post to go over how to use a Windows Server as a NTP server for your network devices and then I’ll probably circle back and cover how to do it with a Linux server if I have the time.

The Packet Thrower's Blog

The drunken rambling of a snazzy consultant

Author: The Packet Thrower