VRF Selection Based on Source IP Addresses

April 9th, 2009 mmahmoud Posted in Bury the hatchet, MPLS 2 Comments »

In this post we are going to cover a nice tool, actually I’ve never used it in production, but I was fully testing it during my CCIE SP lab preparations and wish to share it with you. It’s nice to have such a tool in your tool box when dealing with complex designs.
The VRF Selection [...]

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IS-IS and fast convergence ongoing tricks

March 22nd, 2009 mmahmoud Posted in Bury the hatchet, ISIS, MPLS, Network Design 6 Comments »

Been a while since my last post, I was extremely busy doing a lot of things, anyway I am glade to be back.
This post I am going to cover a nice tool for enhancing IS-IS convergence, I am really amazed by the ideas that the guys out there pop up. Inventing such wonderful tools requires [...]

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VRF Lite

February 15th, 2009 Wael Osama Posted in CISCO HOW-TO, MPLS 2 Comments »

The word VRF stands for Virtual Routing and Forwarding, this feature is used to create multiple instances of the routing table on the same routing device. VRFs are usally used in conjunction with MPLS VPN to separate the traffic of multiple MPLS VPN customers. VRF Lite feature is part of Cisco’s network virtualization portfolio. VRF [...]

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MPLS VPN security threats

January 28th, 2009 Wael Osama Posted in MPLS, Security No Comments »

MPLS L3 VPN services is widely used nowadays by many enterprises and organizations. They provide a lot of flexibility in connecting different sites compared to L2VPN services and offloads a lot of the responsibilities from the enterprise to the provider.
I have gained all my networking experience in service provider environments, and have seen very little [...]

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LDP neighbor discovery, session establishment and maintenance

January 19th, 2009 mmahmoud Posted in Bury the hatchet, MPLS 5 Comments »

Team working is all about producing results with a group of people you love working with … Being part of the same team, working together all day long we decided to extend this level of team working from being members of the same team and writing in the same blog to even write this post [...]

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What is LDP extended discovery?

January 10th, 2009 Wael Osama Posted in MPLS, What Is ? 2 Comments »

Normally LDP neighbors are found automatically by sending UDP Hello packets on Port 646 with the destination of multicast address 224.0.0.2 out of each LDP enabled interface.
In some MPLS applications a LDP session must be established between non directly connected peers to exchange labels. In such cases Hello packets can not be just broadcasted, instead [...]

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Draft Martini, Draft Kompella and L2VPN services

January 7th, 2009 mmahmoud Posted in Bury the hatchet, MPLS 3 Comments »

Draft Martini and Draft Kompella were the starting points toward standardizing the Layer2 VPN architectures using pseudowire emulation, both drafts addressed setting up pseudowire emulation over MPLS-based networks in order to offer Layer 2 VPN services, but each draft proposed a different approach. Members of the networking community divided themselves into two camps based on [...]

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MPLS Special Labels

January 3rd, 2009 Mounir Mohamed, CCIE#19573 Posted in MPLS No Comments »

MPLS label range from 0 to 1,048,575 (configurable on Cisco IOS) Labels 0 through 15 are reserved labels. An LSR cannot use them in the normal case for forwarding packets, the labels from 16 through 1,048,575 are used for normal packet forwarding. In Cisco IOS, the default range is 16 through 100,000. This number is [...]

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Static Routes Label Binding

January 1st, 2009 Mounir Mohamed, CCIE#19573 Posted in MPLS 1 Comment »

In this post we will be discussing the label binding for static routes and the forwarding of labeled packets destined to these destinations.
IP routing protocols build the IP routing table, and each LSR assigns a label to every destination in its IP routing table independently (Independent LSP Control – Connected, static or learned dynamically via [...]

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Carrier Supporting Carrier – The whole story (2)

December 29th, 2008 mmahmoud Posted in Bury the hatchet, MPLS No Comments »

In this post we are going to discuss both CSC options that we have highlighted in the previous post in details. The two available options are either an ISP customer carrier, or a BGP/MPLS VPN customer carrier.
We are going to conquer the control plane and data plane separately, in order to well understand the complete [...]

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