Category: Service Providers

Every time I rant about large-scale bridging and stretched L2 subnets, someone inevitably points out that Carrier (or Metro) Ethernet works perfectly fine using the same technologies and principles.

I won’t spend any time on the “perfectly fine” part, but focus on the fundamental difference between the two: the use case.

Instead of drinking beer and lab-testing vodka during the PLNOG party I enjoyed DHCPv6 discussions with Tomasz Mrugalski, the “master-of-last-resort” for the ISC’s DHCPv6 server. I mentioned my favorite DHCPv6 relay problem (relay redundancy) and while we immediately agreed I’m right (from the academic perspective), he brought up an interesting question – is this really an operational problem?

Did you rush to try OSPF Loop-Free Alternate on a Cisco 7200 after reading my LFA blog post… and disappointedly discovered that it only works on Cisco 7600? The reason is simple: while LFA does add feasible-successor-like behavior to OSPF, its primary mission is to improve RIB-to-FIB convergence time.

One of the areas where IPv6 sorely lacks feature parity with IPv4 is user authentication and source IP spoofing prevention in large-scale Carrier Ethernet networks. Metro Ethernet switches from numerous vendors offer all the IPv4 features a service provider needs to build a secure and reliable access network where the users can’t intercept other users’ traffic or spoof source IP addresses, and where it’s always possible to identify the end customer from an IPv4 address – a mandatory requirement in many countries. Unfortunately, you won’t find most of these features in those few Metro Ethernet switches that support IPv6.

The flooding attacks (or mishaps) on large layer-2 networks are well known and there are ample means to protect the network against them, for example storm control available on Cisco’s switches. Now imagine you change the source MAC address of every packet sent to a perfectly valid unicast destination.

Just got this question from one of my Service Provider friends: “If I am building a new MPLS backbone from scratch, should I design it with Carrier’s Carrier in mind?” Of course you should ... after all, the CsC functionality has almost no impact on the MPLS backbone (apart from introducing an extra label in the label stack).

One of the interesting problems I was facing in the recent weeks was multi-tenant security. Combine it with fuzzy all-encompassing vapor-based terminology and you have a perfect mix that can fit anything you want to sell. In the Ensuring multi-tenant security in cloud services I wrote for SearchTelecom.com I tried to structure the cloudy visions a bit: let’s figure out which type of service we’re talking about, then we can discuss what security mechanisms make sense.

Chris Pollock from io Networks was kind enough to share yet another method of implementing DHCPv6 prefix delegation on PPP interfaces in his comment to my DHCPv6-RADIUS integration: the Cisco way blog post: if you tell the router not to use the Framed-IPv6-Prefix passed from RADIUS in the list of prefixes advertised in RA messages with the no ipv6 nd prefix framed-ipv6-prefix interface configuration command, the router uses the prefix sent from the RADIUS server as delegated prefix.

This setup works reliably in IOS release 15.0M. 12.2SRE3 (running on a 7206) includes the framed-IPv6-prefix in RA advertisements and DHCPv6 IA_PD reply, totally confusing the CPE.

In the Building Large IPv6 Service Provider Networks webinar I described how Cisco IOS uses two RADIUS requests to authenticate an IPv6 user (request#1) and get the delegated prefix (request#2). The second request is sent with a modified username (-dhcpv6 is appended to the original username) and an empty password (the fact that is conveniently glossed over in all Cisco documentation I found).

FreeRADIUS server is smart enough to bark at an empty password, to force the RADIUS server to accept a username with no password you have to use Auth-Type := Accept:

Site-A-dhcpv6   Auth-Type := Accept
        cisco-avpair = "ipv6:prefix#1=fec0:1:2400:1100::/56"

Last week I got an interesting tweet: “Hey @ioshints can you tell me what is the radius parameter to send ipv6 dns servers at pppoe negotiation?” It turned out that the writer wanted to propagate IPv6 DNS server address with IPv6CP, which doesn’t work. Contrary to IPCP, IPv6CP provides just the bare acknowledgement that the two nodes are willing to use IPv6. All other parameters have to be negotiated with DHCPv6 or ICMPv6 (RA/SLAAC).

The following table compares the capabilities of IPCP with those offered by a combination of DHCPv6, SLAAC and RA (IPv6CP is totally useless as a host parameter negotiation tool):