We all know that BGP is meant to converge slowly… well, the MPLS/VPN service providers tend to disagree, as their users are not used to minute-long convergence times. One of the major components of slow BGP convergence is the time it takes a router to discover that a neighbor has disappeared. Traditionally, the BGP keepalive packets were sent every minute and it took up to three minutes to discover that a neighbor is down.

Of course you could fine-tune those times with the neighbor timers configuration command, but the reduced timers resulted in increased TCP traffic and consequently increased CPU load, which could reach tens of percents if the timers were set to a few seconds and the router had lots of BGP neighbors.

After I've fixed the default routing in my home office, I've stumbled across another problem: the two ISPs I'm using for my primary and backup link have DNS servers that reply solely to the DNS requests sent from their own IP address range:

When the traffic is switched from the primary to the backup ISP, I therefore also need to switch the DNS servers. Fortunately, this is quite easy to do on a router; you just need to configure ppp ipcp dns request on the dialer interface and the router starts asking for the DNS server address as part of the IPCP negotiation.

It's amazing how many options (most of them still undocumented) the show interfaces command accepts in IOS release 12.4T (I won't even start guessing when each one was introduced, if you're running old IOS releases, please feel free to comment):

• show interfaces description displays interface names, L1 and L2 status (line and line-protocol status) and interface description. Extremely handy if you want to check which interfaces are up/down.
• show interfaces counters protocol status displays the L3 protocols active on each interface.
• show interfaces summary displays the state of various interface queues and related drop counters in a nice tabular format.
• show interfaces accounting displays per-protocol in/out counters.

Here are a few sample printouts:

When I’ve been describing the limitations of kron, someone quickly asked an interesting question:

As I cannot insert extra input keystrokes with EEM applet, can I run a Tcl script from it with the action sequence cli command “tclsh script” command and use the typeahead function call to get around the limitation?”

The only answer I could give at that time was “maybe” … and obviously it was time for a more thorough test. The short result is: YES, you can do it (at least in IOS release 12.4(15)T1).

When two groups within Cisco needed time-based command execution in Cisco IOS, they (in a typical big-corporation fashion) decided to implement the same wheel from two different sets of spokes and rims. One group built the Embedded Event Manager with its event timer cron command (introduced in 12.2(25)S and 12.3(14)T), the other group created the more limited kron command set (introduced in 12.3(1)).

In my home office, I'm using DSL access to the Internet with ISDN backup to another ISP, as shown on the next figure:

Obviously, I would like the ISDN backup to kick in whenever the primary connection goes down; two static default routes and reliable static routing on the primary default seem like a perfect solution.

I've stumbled across a blog post that indicates there's still confusion on some fundamental configuration issues. I will not even try to guess whether there is a wide consensus on how to configure a router, but these are the facts (and here is a ten year old position from Cisco):

• Type-7 encryption used in enable password has been broken. Source code for the decrypt program and cracker programs are available online, or you could use a router to do it for you.
• The type-7 encryption is reversible (and easily breakable due to a weak algorithm), whereas type-5 encryption is a one-way encryption that probably requires a dictionary attack to break.
• Based on the previous two facts, you should never use enable password. Use enable secret.
• The service password-encryption encodes passwords attached to local usernames with type-7 encryption. The usage of type-7 encryption is necessary as you might need the cleartext passwords in some authentication mechanisms (for example, CHAP). However, it's still better to have scrambled passwords than cleartext ones; at least a casual observer will not be able to read them. Conclusion: use service password-encryption.
• If your authentication methods don't need cleartext passwords (examples: local username/password authentication, local AAA authentication or PAP authentication), use username secret configuration command (available from IOS releases 12.2T, 12.3 and 12.0S).

I had to figure out various PPP parameters (and associated Cisco IOS behavior) and didn't have real dial-up equipment in my lab setup. I could have gone with PPPoE, but it turned out it's way simpler to emulate dialup connections (at least the PPP negotiations work as expected) on fixed serial lines. This is the minimum setup you need on the “caller” side …

interface Serial1/0
 ip address negotiated
 encapsulation ppp
 ppp authentication pap optional
 ppp pap sent-username client password 0 client

… and this is the “server”-side configuration:

Martin Kluge sent me an interesting BGP question: he has two upstream links and runs BGP on both. Since his router is low on RAM, he cannot accept full routing, so he’s just announcing his IP prefix and using static default routing toward upstream ISPs.

Tim Riegert sent me an interesting hint: you don't need password crackers to decode type-7 passwords, you just need access to a router. Here's how you do it:

We'll turn on type-7 encryption for local passwords and generate a test username