Networkers-online.com

Overload bit is special bit in the IS-IS LSP used to inform the network that the advertising router is not yet ready to forward transit traffic.  The overload bit was first intended for signaling overload or resource shortage on specific router for the rest of the network. You can use the command set-overload-bit intentionally on [...]

In my post about out of band management networks I mentioned console servers as a mean of providing centralized remote access to network devices collocated in the same site. This post is a complementary post for the previous one if you are planning to use a console server in your out of band management network. [...]

Building a robust out of band management network is a critical part of any service provider or large enterprise backbone. Although failures may not occur frequently but believe me if you are not prepared when they happen you will know how OoB management is important and critical. Network failures do happen for reasons ranging from [...]

In this post we’ll be covering a couple of topics from the Inside Out of the link-state protocols that have always been ambiguous and full of details, we’ll try to make them as crystal clear as we can.

In this post we are going to cover the protocol packets and database structure for both routing protocols. To start let’s first highlight a couple of facts. OSPF runs on top of IP, that is it uses IP packets to exchange its messages (and thus it is vulnerable to spoofing and DoS attacks, and accordingly [...]

In our previous post we started consolidating the endless story of OSPF vs IS-IS, in this post we will cover the historical part of the story, it might not be interesting for some people, but I do believe that the history is what makes the future, so please bare with me through this post.

Whenever you have a little IGP chit chat you’ll hit this endless story. I’ve tried to reach a final solid conclusion my self but IMHO its all about personal preference and taste. It is something like a Ferrari vs Lamborghini story, they offer comparable performance, but totally different feeling. It is all about a good [...]

This question comes to my mind every time we are faced by choosing a new device for our network or whenever I read about hardware architecture of networking devices. However, when the time comes for  choosing routers for a large network migration I thought it will be wise to have a checklist or a model [...]

After introducing the Cisco  CRS-1 router in a previous post, We are going to delve more into the hardware architecture of this router. I believe we have to start by defining the main hardware components of the CRS-1 router and briefly describe their functions. In later posts we are going to study each part in [...]

We have finished the physical installation of our CRS-1 routers this week, so I thought it would be nice to have some discussions about CRS-1, Juniper T-series and some general high end platform concepts. I believe this will be a series of posts, we can start with the CRS-1 overview. The CRS-1 is a carrier [...]