Category: Configuration

Some of my readers commented on my old article about reflexive access-list with issues in the configuration. I tried it in the lab again to be sure I didn’t make any mistake in the configuration example and here I’m sharing the lab and the config used.

About Reflexive Access Lists

Extended ACLs are a special kind of extended access-lists that have limited stateful behaviour technique implemented for TCP sessions. It is better to say that reflexive access-list is simulating stateful behaviour because it, by use of ‘established’ command, is allowing TCP packets that have the ‘ACK’ bit set but not the initial ‘SYN-only’ packet. In this way, we are effectively permitting only the packets that are part of an established session.

In my prior article, I showed how this works by enabling PING from PC1 in VLAN 10 to PC2 in VLAN 20 but not the other way.

I created the lab topology in GNS3:

I already wrote about Control Plane Protection in one of my previous posts focused on Cisco device configuration. Here we will make the same thing on Juniper device, I was using Juniper SRX300 and Juniper SRX1500 devices in my lab.

CoPP ??

Control Plane Protection (CoPP) is a method of protecting processor unit, running services on your network device, against excessive flooding. Excessive flooding of traffic aimed towards your router/firewall processor, being that valid or malicious, is always undesirable and can also be dangerous.

A network device, which starts the receive more control traffic that his processor can process, will eventually experience control traffic packet drops and it will lead to some of the router functions to become unstable. Some of the most common control traffic generating services on a router are routing protocols with different update packets, Spanning Tree with BPDU packets, HSRP, CDP, ARP, and different management traffic services like SSH, SNMP, RADIUS etc.

Some of those control plane traffic types are more important than others but they all have in common the fact that they don’t normally use much bandwidth to function. Having that in mind, it is easy to conclude that the situation above with router processor at 100% because of control plane traffic is most surely caused by a DDoS attack towards your device.

More unusual is the situation when a neighboring device is experiencing some kind of malfunction which makes him send large amounts of control plane traffic out of his interfaces towards your device.

CoPP is the best way to avoid this kind of attacks or malfunctions to get in the way of your network device stability. CoPP is basically configuration of QoS inbound to your device control plane (CPU).

CoPP Best Practices

The way to configure CoPP in the most stable and effective way is to use guaranteed minimal available bandwidth for each control plane traffic type.

If you have a Juniper device that needs to be sent to RMA or you are just putting it to some other use on your network, you will probably want to completely clear the configuration on it.

There are different ways to do it for different purpose.

If you want to securely wipe all data from this device and make it completely like when you received it from the store then next command is the right one to use:

I was preparing lab environment to test configuration of Source-Specific Multicast on Juniper SRX Equipment and needed a tool to generate and measure Source-Specific Multicast streams.

I was aware that Iperf is a good enough tool to generate and measure multicast and unicast traffic but support for SSM was missing from current version. Fortunately there are always some developers which are interested in networking so one of them developed a special Iperf version 2.0.5 with SSM support.

The idea here is to show how to make this version of Iperf work on your Cent OS or similar Linux machine.

Here are few steps that should work from your Cent OS 6.8 Linux Server and hopefully from other similar distributions to:

In SSM, Source-Specific Multicast, things are done differently from standard multicast forwarding. SSM is specifying a group of hosts that are receiving same multicast stream using group IP address and additionally using stream unicast source IP.

In this article it is shown how to configure Source Specific Multicast on Cisco and Juniper equipment.

In standard multicast, forwarding is done using group IP address which is an IP from multicast dedicated range 224.0.0.0/4 (224.0.0.0 – 239.255.255.255) or FF00::/8 in IPv6. Each multicast group IP address is a single address which specifies all hosts receiving a specific stream, streamed towards that group IP address from multicast source. In standard multicast everybody can start to stream with some IP multicast group IP, becoming in that way, the multicast source.