George sent me a question that surfaced age-old memories:

I saw the Serial 0/1/0 interface in one of your articles. I understand the Serial 0/1 command as accessing the sub interface of Serial 0 with the 1st interface. But I have never seen the 2nd 0 being used. What is the 2nd "0", and how is it to be used?

In the ancient times when the high-end router was an AGS+, the interface names were kept simple (for example, Serial0). When the Cisco 7000 was introduced with online insertion and removal (OIR) capability, router's life became more complex, as its actual hardware (and thus the interface names) might change while it's running.

Chris sent me an interesting question:

How many secondary IPs can you put on a Vlan on a Catalyst switch?

The best way to figure out the answer to this question is to close the browser window pointing to google.com (you won’t find the answer there), generate a test configuration and try to load it into your box.

Cisco has unveiled numerous green solutions in the last few months, including energy-saving ASR 9000 router and GreenWise initiative. Now they went a step further and implemented some of the old energy-efficient wireless technologies, proving that you don’t always need new technologies to address the energy efficiency (see also Myth #8 in Top 10 Myths about Sustainability).

The first step in GreenWise wireless rollout are the new high-density line cards for the ASR 9000 routers. The port adapters and SFP modules in these line cards will support RFC 1149 with its low-electricity requirements, low-emission focused RFC 1926 as well as RFC 4824 addressing the needs of the health care vertical market. The first release of the line cards will not support all QoS requirements of RFC 2549 due to the limited processing power of the on-card PPU.

You can find detailed information on these revolutionary line cards and adapters among the other in-depth data sheets documenting ASR 9000 platform and line cards (snapshot of the page).

The Wake-on-LAN discussion we had a while ago brought us nowhere; there's simply no way to generate UDP packets on the router. I thought I could use Application Performance Monitor's Tcl scripts to generate the packet, but it looks like APM has been removed from recent IOS releases (and it's not clear whether you can use APM without a peer router).

The discussion nonetheless had an interesting side effect. Robert Turnšek sent me an interesting trick: with static ARP you can generate layer-2 broadcasts with a layer-3 unicast packet.

Network World just published an article on LISP, including a quote attributed to Geoff Huston:

LISP relies on tunneling, and tunneling is not 100% perfect. At times, the tunnel passes a packet that's too big and it disappears without a trace to the sender or the recipient…That's really bad.

We all know what can go wrong with the tunnels: a combination of:

• MTU setting on a core link that is too low to accomodate tunnel envelope+payload with
• Tunnel headend that cannot respond to Fragmentation needed ICMP message.

Yesterday I’ve described the difference between line rate and bit rate (actually physical layer gross bit rate and physical layer net bit rate). Going to the other extreme, we can measure goodput (application-level throughput), which obviously depends on multiple factors, including the TCP window sizes and end-to-end delays. There are numerous tools to test the goodput from/to various locations throughout the world (speedtest.net worked quite nicely for me) and you’ll soon discover that the goodput on your DSL line differs significantly from what the ISP is advertising.

Rajendra had an interesting problem:

Recently I got confused with the term line-rate. Is it the packets being switched across the switch fabric or control packets destined to the protocol tasks or both or something else?

The line rate is a physical layer term that has nothing to do with the line cards or switching fabrics. It indicates the actual speed with which the bits are sent onto the wire (and is thus also known as physical layer gross bit rate). The data transfer rate (commonly known as bit rate) is the transfer rate offered by the physical layer to the data link layer. If you want to be precise, you should call it physical layer net bit rate.

Two well-known physical layer technologies with different line rate and data transfer rate are ISDN (actually the I.430 recommendation) with 160192 kbps line rate and 144 kbps data transfer rate and Gigabit Ethernet (the 802.3z recommendation) with 1.25 Gbps line rate (due to 8b/10b encoding).

This article is part of You've asked for it series.

Sebastian sent me an interesting question:

I have read that we can only use 75% of the bandwidth for the custom queues as 25% is reserved for the keepalives and routing protocol updates. If I want to set 50% of bandwidth for a particular queue should it 50% of the total bandwidth or 50% of the available 75% of the bandwidth?

Before going into the details, it’s important to remember that the WFQ (CB-WFQ is only a mechanism to sort packets into output queues) uses relative ratios (percentages) between queues to determine which packet to send (the absolute bandwidths are used just to compute the ratios).

The reader who was concerned about making a loop while connecting a switch to itself was also facing “customer-installed” DHCP servers in his LAN. He wrote:

Some users have installed their own Linksys routers and plug our cable in router's LAN ports, so there is DHCP servers fight in our LAN. How can I sort this out (I cannot physically find the location of the Linsys routers)?

The ideal solution is DHCP snooping (assuming your switch supports it), well documented on www.cisco.com. The basic configuration takes only a few minutes: