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Red Hat Taste of Training - RH134

Advanced skills for the experienced Linux administrator.

Fast track to RHCSA for experienced system administrators

Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS) has been around since a little after the inception of Cisco Systems as a company. In 1984, Len and Sandy Bosack from Stanford University founded Cisco Systems with a small commercial gateway server. The first Cisco router that I touched was an Advanced Gateway Server (AGS), which was the first marketed product of the company. After this came the Mid-Range Gateway Server (MGS), the Compact Gateway Server (CGS) and later the Integrated Gateway Server (IGS) and AGS+. The first version of IOS that I touched was 8.2(7). The operating system was based on a Unix-based system and was designed as a monolithic operating system, meaning that processes are stacked and interrelated.

Despite advances in security, hackers continue to break through network defenses. In this hour-long webinar, network security specialist Catherine Paquet will examine the favorite methods and targets of hackers and will introduce you to the different categories of security technologies. In this foundational presentation, you will learn about the benefits of security solutions such as firewalls, VPNs, IPS, identity services and BYOD.

Security attacks have become more advanced; therefore, security solutions have needed to evolve to deal with those threats. Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire brings a new paradigm to the security landscape. No longer is security a one-time, instantaneous event. Security now is threat based, network cognizant, and continuous. All organizations, public and private, need to be aware not only of the constantly changing threat environment, but must be prepared to respond in kind.

Cisco Collaboration Systems Release (CSR) 10.6, along with CUCM 10.5(2), enhances the user and administrator experiences and interactions. In many cases, a change to one product may necessitate changes to other products. For example, where the deployment options for video conference control changed to place all control behind the Telepresence Conductor, Cisco Prime Collaboration management tools had to be updated to reflect this new deployment approach. As new endpoints are added, CUCM and Prime Collaboration both needed to be updated to reflect the new endpoints.

When properly utilized, VLANs and trunks provide flexibility, stability and ease of troubleshooting. This paper provides technical details about VLANs and trunks, along with design options at a basic to intermediate level. Recommendations and commands are included throughout.

On February 17, 2015, Cisco announced changes to the existing voice and video certifications and detailed the new collaboration certification portfolio. This white paper provides an overview of the changes to Cisco certifications with respect to voice and video, outlining dates, and deadlines that may affect your certification process.

Switches play a vital role in moving data from one device to another. Specifically, switches greatly improve network performance, compared to hubs, by providing dedicated bandwidth to each end device, supporting full-duplex connectivity, utilizing the MAC address table to make forwarding decisions, and utilizing ASICs and CAM tables to increase the rate at which frames can be processed.

IT architecture is undergoing a period of rapid change and evolution. With this change comes enormous opportunity for professionals who are not just deep in a single technology but deeply conversant in several and who can join these technologies together to meet the needs of today's enterprise. The Red Hat Certified Architect program provides a credential that represents these skills and knowledge. Through a combination of flexible requirements and recommended concentrations, Red Hat is providing a path for professionals to advance their careers and for its subscription customers to find the right architect.

This paper explains uplink strategies for traffic coming in and out of a Cisco Unified Computing Solution (UCS) chassis. An uplink can be Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or FCoE and is a physical connection on the FI that leaves the UCS domain directed away from the B Chassis.

This paper covers the configuration of IP Multicast with Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) including the basics of Multicast with the Group Encrypted Transport VPN (GETVPN).

With ever increasing demands for storage, system administrators often find themselves needing to add new storage to servers. This video provides step-by-step examples of how to partition, format, and mount new storage space using Linux.

A Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Network (DMVPN) can be used with other networks like Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), but streaming multicast is accomplished quite well using "Default" and "Data" Multicast Distribution Trees (MDTs) with MPLS.

Cisco Unified Computing Solution (UCS) is a very popular and powerful solution. Cisco continues to provide updated UCS management options for the full range of data center installations.

The first big push toward implementation of IPv6 was mobile devices. Now, one of the driving forces is the Internet of Things. As the name implies, this means everything, including machine to machine communication (M2M).

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Like it or not, Internet of Things (IoT) is upon us. There are a number of factors that will impact its adoption rate, and the inevitable privacy (or lack of) discussions will likely happen sooner than later. This is going to change the world as we know it, in many cases for the better. But we will need to keep an eye on the extent to which it invades our personal lives if it is going to be the positive force it has the potential to be.

While there are differences between the IP Multicast configuration in the IOS and the Nexus OS, the Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) protocol remains fundamentally the same. If you feel comfortable configuring Multicast in the IOS, you should be able to acclimate fairly easily to the changes in the Nexus OS.

Multicast Sparse Mode and its derivatives are supported in the Nexus OS. This white paper explains how it has been implemented in the Nexus platform to provide optimum performance in both virtual PortChannel and FabricPath environments.

The Bash shell is a powerful tool for managing Linux servers. This video offers a number of tips and tricks for using Bash to help make working on the Linux command-line easier and faster. It explores time saving tools like tab completion, command history, and brace expasion as well as how to combine commands together to create powerful new tools using piping.

Now that we are moving towards IPv6, the logical move would be to also run OSPF for that protocol suite, which makes sense and reduces the learning curve for implementation and support. But, that would mean that you have to run two OSPF processes — one for IPv4 unicast and one for IPv6 unicast. That means two sets of policies have to be applied, including security for OSPF itself. Running OSPFv3 for both IPv4 and IPv6 reduces the number routing protocols and the configuration that goes with that. It makes it easier to implement policy in a consistent way for both protocol suites.

What is PBR? Policy-Based Routin (PBR) is the process of using a route map to match on something more than the destination and then defining the path out of the router based on those conditions. PBR could match on destination only, but typically we would match on more. PBR is considered to be an exception to the RIB and is looked at before examining the RIB.

Cisco provides a wide array of connectivity and isolation tools within the datacenter. This white paper addresses Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF), which is a Layer 3 isolation mechanism for routing protocols.

As I’ve stated before, I like Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). I think it’s an interesting protocol, and yes — it’s complicated, but I guess that part of why I like it. There are a lot of knobs to tweak in BGP, maybe too many, but that’s another post. Anyway, we are now running BGP version 4 and it has had extensions written that support more than just IPv4 unicast routing. We now have IPv4 multicast, IPv6 unicast and multicast, VPNv4, VPNv6, and a few others.

Where should you apply the CSS, and why are there two places to apply it? One approach is to pick one of the parameters and apply the permissions there. Quite often, an administrator will pick the phone-level CSS and configure it there so that it applies to all calls made from all lines. The goal is to specify what partitions are allowed to be called. 

For smaller companies, configuring a dial plan to account for variations in dialed numbers is often not a problem. However, companies that are larger and more global in nature encounter a number of issues when designing their dial plan approach.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a fascinating protocol because there are a lot of things that can be done with BGP. However, there has always been an issue with BGP, which is convergence (the time the network or protocol takes to accept change). BGP was designed for scale, not speed, so it’s something that we’ve had to tolerate from its inception.

License provisioning has always been a bit of a challenge in the CUCM environment. Prior to CUCM v9.0, licensing was managed on a per-cluster basis with each cluster requiring its own license files that were tied to the media access control (MAC) address of the cluster’s publisher. This approach to license management was limiting in the fact that one cluster might have unused licenses while another cluster may be at its limit and sharing between clusters was not possible.

Occasionally I am asked to configure the ability to block calls based on Caller ID. Prior to Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) v8, the only way to block these calls was to configure voice translation rules and profiles on the gateway receiving the calls. This has changed in CUCM v8 with the introduction of an additional parameter in translation patterns: Route Next Hop By Calling Party Number.

Moving data from one networked device to another requires several different functions. Each function has its own protocol or protocols that define how it is accomplished. Also, the process of delivering data from one device to another can vary. The main factor in data delivery is determining whether the two devices are directly connected or remotely connected.

Moving data from one networked device to another requires several different functions. Each function has its own protocol or protocols that define how it is accomplished. Also, the process of delivering data from one device to another can vary. The main factor in data delivery is determining whether the two devices are directly connected or remotely connected.

While most organizations have not yet fully (or in many cases even partially) adopted cloud computing, the trend is growing in all but the smallest businesses.

The process of learning how to subnet IP addresses begins with understanding binary numbers and decimal conversions along with the basic structure of IPv4 addresses. This paper focuses on the mathematics of binary numbering and IP address structure.

The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a powerful tool for managing storage on Linux servers. This video provides an overview of how LVM works and explores several ways that LVM makes storage management easier and more flexible. Examples include how to expand storage capacity on the fly using LVM and resize2fs, and how to migrate data from local storage to a storage area network (SAN) without downtime using pvmove.

While the Internet uses IP addresses assigned by an Internet authority such as the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), there are too few of these numbers to uniquely identify the millions of computers and computing devices in the world. Therefore, most enterprises use private addresses which allow them to identify the aforementioned computers. Of course, these IP numbers cannot be allowed on the Internet because all private networks use the same ones so there would be vast overlapping of addresses, and the addresses are not compliant anyway. Therefore, it is necessary to change the identity of a private host to a legal public host. This process is called Network Address Translation (NAT) and may be implemented on Cisco firewall products and Cisco routers. The firewall device(s) at the Internet demarcation point is by far the more popular way to implement NAT, but routers are used in small offices or small-to-medium-sized networks in which a separate firewalling solution is not possible or affordable. The focus of this paper is on the router-based NAT solution.

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is dead, or at least it should be. It’s too slow to converge when there’s a change, and it causes issues with performance because there is only one forwarding path. It was developed in 1985 by Radia Perlman at Digital Equipment Corporation to allow for redundant paths within a Layer 2 topology, which was great in 1985. In fact, it was huge! So much so, that it was later standardized by the IEEE as 802.1D, and we’ve been living with it ever since.

Cisco Access Control Lists (ACLs) are used in nearly all product lines for several purposes, including filtering packets (data traffic) as it crosses from an inbound port to an outbound port on a router or switch, defining classes of traffic, and restricting access to devices or services. Knowing how to design, configure, and troubleshoot ACLs is required for all network engineers working within a Cisco network.

RTMT provides a set of canned views of both system resources and application counters that provide you with a snapshot of your environment right out of the box. Read on to learn how you can make RTMT even more helpful by customizing it to show you different views of your resources and CUCM environment.