Dan's Network: October 2014

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

GNS3 1.1

I was never a big fan of GUI tools, so I used dynagen and dynamips for my network designs. But since 15.2 was the last version released for 7200, dynamips is no longer useful (especially for IKEv2 and OSPFv3 stuff)

I was hoping that Cisco would release VIRL, and they promised to do so for the past year and a half, but it looks like it will never come. Shelling out 10K$ for CML (the payed version of VIRL) is a bit too much for most of us. But there is a good alternative:

Not long time ago GNS3 version 1.0 was released and soon after version 1.1. was released too. And after long time of being a backer for their funding campaign I have decided to try GNS3 with IOU.

After installing GNS3 on both linux and windows (vmware required), I found that GNS3 is really easy to use, and that IOU is AMAZING. IOU is sooooo fast, and everything just works(tm). I wish I had it years ago!

Goodbye dynamips and dynagen, and thank you so much.

Hello IOU and GNS3. I know it will be a start of a wonderful friendship :)

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

IPv6 to IPv4 basic setup

Lab goal

Configure Alteon to serve IPv6 clients. The servers should use IPv4.

The IPv6 VIP should be fc00:85::10.

Setup

I'll use my Loadbalancer Lab Setup.

The loadbalancer is Radware's Alteon VA version 29.5.1.0

The initial Alteon VA configuration can be found here.

Below is the IPv4 real servers configuration which we will use as a base config.

/c/slb/real 1
        ena
        ipver v4
        rip 10.136.85.1
/c/slb/real 2
        ena
        ipver v4
        rip 10.136.85.2
/c/slb/real 3
        ena
        ipver v4
        rip 10.136.85.3
/c/slb/group 10
        ipver v4
        add 1
        add 2
        add 3

Alteon configuration

All we need to do is create a new virt/VIP and assign it with IPv6 address.

 /c/slb/virt v6_85_10
        ena
        ipver v6
        vip fc00:85:0:0:0:0:0:10
 /c/slb/virt v6_85_10/service 80 http
        group 10
        rport 80
        dbind forceproxy
 /c/slb/virt v6_85_10/service 80 http/pip
        mode address
        addr v4 10.136.85.200 255.255.255.255 persist disable

Notice that we need the pip which is Proxy IP, a.k.a SNAT. Since we translating from IPv6 to IPv4 we need Alteon to act as a proxy and for that it needs IPv4 address to communicate with the real servers.

Test

Summary

That was really simple, wasn't it? Just change the virt/VIP to be IPv6 and we have IPv6 to IPv6 gateway.