Contest#3 @ Packetlife.net

 

Nice contest posted by 'Jeremy' on his blog Packetlife.net. This was the 3rd contest that he had posted on his blog & was very interesting in my opinion. The contest dealt with finding the IOS of the router from within a packet capture that he had uploaded on his blog.

 

Well, I could not find the answer but people did & were rewarded with a Cisco press book. Nice to know that Cisco press is sponsoring the prizes for his contest's.

 

This contest gives some good tips on how to use Wireshark as a took to decode traffic streams & find useful information.

Test

This is test post. Ignore!

Extended ping & traceroute!

I know it's very basic, we use ping & traceroute all the time for troubleshooting, but I still found this one a interesting & informative read.

 

Using the Extended ping and Extended traceroute Commands:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_tech_note09186a0080093f22.shtml

David’s Top Cisco Tips of 2008

David Davis on his blog Happy Router posted the top 5 Cisco tips of 2008 which were later posted on the TechRepublic website. Following are the 5 topics he talks about.

1) The emulator Dynamips Vs any other simulator in the market. What it is & how is it better.
2) A basic article about the 5 things you should know when starting to configure a router from scratch.
3) Packet Trap 360 (pt360) tool suite as a very good tool that combines managing & troubleshooting in one.
4) An article on the 10 stupid things that you can do with your router & how to get out of the mess.
5) Using extended ping & extended traceroute to troubleshoot your network

Here is the link for the entire article.

Nice read.

Blocking traffic destined to unknown unicast/multicast MAC addresses

Nice post on CCIE TO BE about how to block traffic destined for unknown unicast/multicast addresses on a switchport. By default, if a switchport receives unknown unicast traffic it floods it out to all the ports. This behaviour can be stopped using the command "switchport block unicast".

Configuration guide link for this command:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst3750/software/release/12.2_44_se/configuration/guide/swtrafc.html#wp1087814

Command reference link for this command:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst3750/software/release/12.2_44_se/command/reference/cli3.html#wp1948063