Reading Time: 4 minutesI’ve always wanted to find a quick way to test a multicast deployment in a Cisco environment. Many of us are already familiar with simply pinging a multicast address from an interface, and going to another router and issuing the ip igmp join-group command.
I’ve came across a new way to test that I’ve missed over the years but has apparently been around. This tool is the Multicast Routing Monitor. It has a fairly straight forward configuration and will at least give you some view into your multicast domain and it’s functionality.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/using-mrm-to-test-multicast/
Reading Time: 5 minutesI came across a paragraph in an older book in regards to EIGRP operation. As I read it I was kind of dumfounded. To be honest I didn’t believe it at first so of course I had to lab it to see if it was true. It turns out that it is in fact the way EIGRP operates in this very specific circumstance. I had never seen it before in some of my favorite books nor through my favorite video training vendors. So my findings are this: In a very specific scenario, EIGRP will advertise static routes into EIGRP as internal routes without any redistribution statements.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/advertise-static-routes-in-eigrp-without-redistribution/
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe other week I ran into an instance where a group of customers were unable to access Cisco Unified Intelligence Center. Upon further investigation I was unable to get to admin pages of much of the collaboration suite and call control systems from these users computers either. The suite was on various versions of 9.0.X and 9.1.X due to restraints with many third party integration’s. This issue will occur on anything using the cipher suite mentioned below and is not limited to these versions or applications. This is ultimately where the problem stems from but I’ll take you down the path.
To start I’m going to list the fixes in case you don’t want to read my troubleshooting methodology. Then I will walk you through my discovery and detail the fixes. Remember, which fix is correct for your situation will vary based on use case, security policies, etc.
Fix 1: Uninstall Microsoft Updates causing issue
Fix 2: Re-issue certificate (if possible) using strong ciphers (may require upgrading applications)
Fix 3: Use a different web browser
Fix 4: Re-order ciphers via Group Policy
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/ms-kb-31616393161608-break-cucm-uccx-web-access/
Reading Time: 3 minutesI love when tools make my life easier. A conversation came up online the other night and I had shown someone a quick summary of the awesome power of Sublime Text. They wanted to know how I made the magic happen in that video. I felt I should and share it with everyone via a blog post. Here’s a quick video of my uses along with a description of what you can do with it, as well as how to make it work.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/config-ease-with-sublime-text-snippets/
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe other day someone joked that I should write a post about plugging in a cable, or at least something to that extent. Then I started thinking about it. It’s actually a good idea. Everyone has their own way of cabling up a rack of patch panels and switches. Most of us would love to get the exact right length cables for the job however, that’s often not the case. There is a patching strategy I like to use when you are stuck using a box of 7 foot cables when all you really need are 3 foot cables. None the less, we all want it to look as neat as it can when we are done. I’m going to show you my practice when it comes to patching which can be easily modified whether you’r racks follow a panel-switch-panel-switch arrangement or a panel-panel-switch-switch arrangement.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/back-to-basics-patching-a-switch/
Reading Time: 4 minutesI.T. has had a large past of using animals to describe individuals, their attitudes, their skill sets, etc. Some of these originated outside of Information Technology such as the age old “Paper Tiger”. We’ve used terms like coding monkey to describe a programmer capable of knocking out code repetitively and constantly.
I’m going to take a slightly different approach on this concept with a thought and philosophy I’ve been trying to get myself into the mindset of applying on a daily basis. This mindset is something we all have the chance to challenge ourselves on everyday in different situations. The concept is simple and the question goes like this. “Why not become the Raven, rather than the Macaw?” So what am I getting at here? It’s simple, we have two very different birds and many people will chose one or the other based on certain criteria. Here is my logic between the two.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/the-raven-or-the-macaw/
Reading Time: 4 minutesI had the circumstances of lack of budget, broken freeware, and understandable need put me in the position of spinning up another unsupported freeware application in the form of a UCCX Call Center Wallboard. As usual, I tend to be a gluten for punishment and tend to try and fight these type of situations into submission. Luckily for me in this case, I had a great solution (UC Guerrilla’s take on the free wallboard), as well as a great resource at my disposal. That resource is none other than one of the best Exchange, Server, and Client engineers I know, and am rather happy to call a friend and colleague; none other than ibageek03 on Twitter.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/uc-guerrilla-wallboard-on-server-2012-64bit/
Reading Time: 4 minutesA colleague and I have been debating over a few months the topic of troubleshooting. My initial stance on the topic was that you CAN teach troubleshooting. However, as time has passed working with particular individuals I have came to a realization that you CANNOT teach troubleshooting. My belief now is that some people simply have a mind that thinks in logical sequences to rule out options and others don’t. While I’m sure this post may cause some heat towards myself the point isn’t to say anything bad about anyone. My point is that some individuals have a very effective troubleshooting skill set, while others simply have a set rubric of tests that if exhausted, results in a complete halt in process. I’ve come up with four items that impact an individuals ability to troubleshoot effectively even after the initial checklist has been exhausted.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/you-coach-not-teach-troubleshooting/
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By Matt Ouellette in Certification, Cisco, Featured, How To's, LAN Scripts, LAN/WAN, Networking, Real World, Scripts, WAN Scripts
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December 10, 2015
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December 10, 2015
Reading Time: 3 minutesI’ve been working on doing some multicast labs lately and am constantly resetting my lab devices to their default configs and starting from scratch. As many of us know, to enable PIM on all of your interfaces you must go into each interface and enable it manually. There is no default command to enable PIM on all interfaces. We know PIM should be enabled 1 to 1 with interfaces involved in routing making this a boon. With that in mind, and the fact that I am rather comfortable with the concept of needing PIM on the interfaces, and likely speak and type this command in my sleep, I decided to make it easier and modify a previous TCL script I had written to enable PIM on every interface that has an IP address assigned to it. With the great “Send to Chat” feature of SecureCRT I can do this across my entire topology on one fell swoop. In a real world environment, you could use a tool like Solarwinds to push this out to your devices.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/bulk-enable-pim-via-tcl/
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe other night while studying I tweeted out the first six words that came to mind as I thought to myself “How can I retain this better”. The concept is really quite simple and I find myself doing these steps for everything I am trying to learn and retain. While everyone learns *best* a certain way, everyone also learns more by being around the material more. I don’t feel I need to explain how to find what way of learning works best for you. Nor am I going to pretend to have a clue how people learn or retain better in any sort of scientific way. I’m simply going to explain my view on my six word study method.
The Method:
Read, watch, listen, learn, discuss, do!
It’s a simple mantra that you can think about every time you start studying a topic. In fact, you already learn all of these ways throughout the day. The concept here is to apply all six of them to every topic you are focused on studying.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/daily-learning-actions/
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