Category Archives: Networking

15 Days till CCNP Switch Exam

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CCNP_CERTIFIED

On the 20th January 2014 I am sitting the Cisco CCNP Switch Exam. For me this is the first of the 3 CCNP exams.

At the moment I’m pretty stressed out about this. I spent a large chuck of last year trying to study for this exam off and on, so I think I should be okay for it. For me, it’s a case of trying to remember all the stuff I’ve learnt at various points. If I don’t use something, I forget it, as do I imagine most people.

I work for Allied Telesis, which is probably considered a small to medium competitor to Cisco. The Allied Telesis switch operating system, AW+, is a very similar CLI to IOS (read industry standard CLI), which is a fantastic operating system, but I find it a double edge sword in terms of the Cisco exams. It’s great in terms of the fact that I was able to come from all the Cisco NetaCad courses and know how to use the Allied Telesis gear, but there are enough small differences that I’ll need to do a bit of labbing before my switch exam. Along with practicing all the Cisco proprietary features again (PVRST+, HSRP, VTP, DTP etc).

So what should you expect to see on my blog for the next couple of weeks?

Implementing-Cisco-IP-Switched-Networks-SWITCH-Foundation-Learning-Guide-Froom-CCIE-No-EB9781587141645

I’m currently going through the “Implementing Cisco IP Switched Networks (SWITCH) Foundation Learning Guide” again as a refresher for the exam. Each day I’m hopefully going to post my notes from the book, along with a quick review of each chapter.

 

So what other material are you using for studying?

– CBT Nuggets CCNP Switch Video course

I’m lucky in the fact that work has a license for CBT Nuggets.

– CCNP SWITCH 642-813 Quick Reference Guide

I’ve read this before when I sat my NetaCad Switch exam. I intend on reading this a day or two before the exam as a final refresher.

– CCNP Switch Student Lab Manual

I intend on spending a day going through all the labs. I’ve got 2x 3750 along with 2x 3550 to study with for the exam.

– 101 CCNP Labs – Labs

Looks like it could be a good refresher in terms of Labs for the exam.

– How to master CCNP Switch

From what I’ve initially looked at, this book is great. It avoids the waffle Cisco Press books have, and explains things in the simplest form possible. I’m not sure how much of this book I’ll get the chance to read, but had I had more time before my exam, I would have quite liked to read this whole book.

– ?????????

Any other decent quick material I can get. I think at this point I need to find good labs I can practise.

 

So how do you intend on studying for this? How much study have you done so far?

2 years ago I did the Cisco CCNP Switch Netacad course and read the Foundation learning guide which I’m going to be blogging about. Last year I read the Official Cert Guide, purely because it was new material. I decided to reread the Foundation Learning Guide purely because it covers more topics that are in the exam. That and the fact that it is a Cisco Press book, so it should have what’s covered in the exam.

In terms of study so far? I actually only started studying 4 days ago. Other than that I hadn’t done any study for this exam for about 3 months. I could be crazy. I hope not. I really struggle to find time to study for this, as I’m generally doing routing at work, and find it hard to focus on two major topics at the same time. I’ve just had a week off work, and will have the week before the exam off work also. I’m hoping although this is a concentrated amount of time to study for an exam like this, that along with my previous knowledge, I’ll be able to cram enough for the exam.

What study have I done this week? I’ve read the first 3 chapters of the Foundation Learning Guide. My blog posts above will be my notes on the first 3 chapters. My goal is roughly 50 pages of the book a day, along with some CBT Nugget watching. I should finish all this a few days before the exam, in which I’ll do some labbing for a few days, and final review of material along with reading the Quick Reference Guide.

Wish me luck!

 

 

Howto: Getting CUPs working on OpenWRT guide

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TP-LINK WR1043ND

This has been so painful.

I’ve spent hours trying to get this working with little info on google searches for when things have gone wrong.

Fortunately, I have got it working! Hopefully this guide will be of some help if you’re trying to get CUPs working on your wireless router.

What is CUPs? printing….from your wireless router???
CUPs is a linux print server. Using a wireless router, such as the TP-LINK WR1043ND, we’re able to install a new open source firmware such as OpenWrt, and further install different packages, such as CUPs, allowing us to do a lot more with our devices than the manufacturer originally intended.

Issues upon issues…

My first attempt at this saw many different issues.  If you really want to see what I was struggling with, I have a forum post about them here: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=39990

A fresh start

It was time I started again from scratch. I decided I would try out a bleeding edge build and I am now running OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment 12.09-beta, LuCI Trunk (trunk+svn9220). My reason for this is the off chance a package I had installed may have been having issues with “stable” which hasn’t been updated in almost a year (http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1/ar71xx/ shows Dec 2011).

Equipment:
– TP-Link WR1043ND Wireless router
– 10 port powered USB hub (overkill but I got it cheap. The WR1043ND doesn’t do a good job providing power to USB devices, so without a powered hub, you may see strange issues, especially with USB 3G modems.)
– 2GB USB stick (This will be used for spooling for CUPs)
– Brother HL5240 Laser Printer
– Canon MX310 Multifunction Printer

Step 1: Install OpenWRT on your wireless router.

There are enough guides online on this, and I won’t cover it here. All I’m going to say is if you’re currently running OpenWRT and you want to try another version of it, login to your router via the web, then System > Backup / Flash Firmware > Flash new firmware image.

Normally you would download a sysupgrade .bin but I used a factory.bin. This is because I was going between different versions of OpenWRT and I’m not sure if a sysupgrade version may have caused issues. I also unticked “keep settings” since I wanted it back to default config.

Flash the firmware then re-setup any of your basic config (passwords, ip address, wireless SSID etc).

Step 2: Prepare your router for CUPs

At this point, you’ve probably already seen the CUPs guide on the OpenWRT site and are probably stuck on it. Hopefully the below steps will be of some help.

For me running ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT (12.09-beta, r33312), all the required usb packages were already installed. You can check what packages are installed by entering opkg list-installed, or via web by going System > Software.

Basically before you install CUPs you need:
kmod-usb-core
kmod-usb-ohci
libusb

I think you may also need kmod-usb2, and hotplug2.  I have them installed anyway.

CUPs also needs:
zlib, libpthread,  libpng, libjpeg, libstdcpp, and if you’re using a canon printer, you may need cups-bjnp. Note, for all of the above, except cups-bjnp, they may be dependencies for CUPs and I didn’t have to manually install any of them. I have a feeling they all just installed when I installed CUPs.

To install:

opkg update
opkg install kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-ohci libusb kmod-usb2 hotplug2

Make sure you don’t have kmod-usb-printer installed or running.
Why? because CUPs talks directly to the printers and kmod-use-printer is another layer which is used by other apps such as p910nd to communicate with the printer. This is also the reason why you won’t see lp0 under /dev.

Right! Prerequisites are out of the way, lets actually install CUPs!

Step 3: Installing CUPs

From the command line: opkg install cups

That was probably the easiest step of the lot.

Now that CUPs is installed, there’s a bit of config you need to do before it will probably work. As detailed on a forum post on www.newren.com.au, you need to do the following:

Use a text editor (e.g. vi) to open  /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, so:

root@OpenWrt:/# vi /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

change
User Nobody
Group Nobody

to:
User root
Group root

And change AuthClass to AuthClass Anonymous.

Remember to change allowed network to your network,  otherwise you won’t be able to find the printer. E.G:

<Location />
Order Deny,Allow
Allow From 127.0.0.1
Allow From 192.168.0.0/24
</Location>

Change “Allow From 192.168.0.0/24” to the IP subnet you’re using.

Use “:wq” to save the file and quit. Personally I prefer using the text editor nano, so I did opkg install nano, and then nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, edited the file, then ctrl + x, Y, enter.

Then, you need to change the permissions on /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb to 700.

To do this, enter: chmod 700 /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb

This changes the behavior of cups, which normally tries to execute the backend through a user account other than root. This forces the backend to run as root from cups.

Okay! Got this far? Try entering the following command:

root@OpenWrt:/# /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb

You should hopefully see something like:

DEBUG: list_devices
DEBUG: usb_find_busses=1
DEBUG: usb_find_devices=7
direct usb://Canon/MX310%20series?serial=406F4E&interface=1 “Canon MX310 series” “Canon MX310 series” “MFG:Canon;CMD:BJL,BJRaster3,BSCCe,PLI;SOJ:TXT01;MDL:MX310 series;CLS:PRINTER;DES:Canon MX310 series;VER:1.030;STA:10;HRI:EU;MSI:E3;” “”

Yus! This is a good sign! This means that CUPs is talking correctly with your printers. Get an error? I originally had:

root@OpenWrt:/usr/lib/cups/backend# /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb
/usr/lib/cups/backend/usb: can’t load library ‘libusb-0.1.so.4’

 

Fix:
root@OpenWrt:/usr/lib# opkg update
Downloading http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1/ar71xx/packages/Packages.gz.
root@OpenWrt:/usr/lib# opkg install libusb

Step 4: Accessing CUPs

To access cups, enter http://ip-address-of-your-router:631/admin, so for me it’s http://192.168.0.1:631/admin

You may be requested to login, just use your root account, unless you’ve created another account.

Next go Admin > Add Printer, and you should be presented with the following screen:

CUPs add printerAs you can see, CUPs HAS picked up both my printers correctly, and I’m able to go through each following step in setting them up. What if CUPs doesn’t show anything there for you?

Try the following, which was posted on http://9m2tpt.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/cups-hl-2140-usb-printer-wzr-hp-g300nh.html:

To add the printer, just go to http://your-router-ip-address:631 Go to administration, add printer, select the AppSocket/HP JetDirect option. Remember the output from /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb? Use the URI there and paste it into the “Connection” field. Example, for my printer, the URI returned by the backend command is: usb://Brother/HL-2140%20series?serial=F9J555425

Okay! So if your printers DID show up and you didn’t have to do the paragraph above, select your printer and click next. There’s two ways you can install your printer. You can either install it as RAW, or you can install a PPD file for your printer. Without going into detail, I believe you’re better off installing using a ppd file. If my case with the Brother HL5240, I was able to get the ppd file from: http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Brother/Brother-HL-5240

Go through all the steps and you should have your printer sitting as idle under printers. At this point, you should be able to add your printer on a client and try printing a test page.

Note: Due to limited functionality of CUPs on the router, you can’t print a test page from within CUPs on the device.

Step 5: Configuring a Windows 7 Client for the CUPs Printer

1. Click Start, and type add a printer.
2. Click add a network, wireless, or Bluetooth printer.
3. Click “The printer  that I want isn’t listed.”

4. Select the second option, and paste the full URL to the printer. In CUPs, select Printers > followed by the printer itself. The url in your address bar is what you should paste below. Then install the correct drivers for your device. On the last screen you could click “print a test page” followed by finish.

At this point, hopefully a test page has printed. Wohoo!!

I spent hours getting to this point. And it’s a fantastic feeling having your wireless router act as a print server. The thing to remember is, it’s not over yet….

Configure a USB drive for spooling storage

One issue that we face having a wireless router act as a print server, is that this wasn’t its original function, and therefore there are certain constraints that we must get around. 1 is that the router has an extremely small and limited internal memory. With CUPs, when a user sends a job to the printer, the whole file gets transferred across, and needs to be stored, or cached somewhere while the printer gets ready to start printing. Therefore, we need to set up a usb drive for spooling. You may get away with not having to do this step, but you also may have print job issues down the track if you’re printing a big file. Chances are you have a spare usb flash drive lying around not being used, so why not just do the extra step.

For this step, there are other guides online for configuring a flash drive for OpenWrt, not to mention the OpenWrt usb storage page. There’s quite a good guide on it here. For me though, I have a linux Mint laptop, so I just plugged in my spare usb drive, apt-get installed gparted, and then configured 90% of the flash drive with ext4, and the last 10% as SWAP. I also changed the permissions on the flash drive and used permissions you probably shouldn’t use by doing “sudo chmod 777 /mnt/flash drive” which basically gives all users read write and execute permissions. For me I don’t think there will be any issues with this.

Following the guides above, I did:
opkg update
opkg install kmod-usb-storage kmod-fs-ext4 block-mount

At this point there is two ways you could mount your storage, either using the CLI/SSH or via the gui web page. Personally doing it with the web page, as I find it easier.

If you don’t have the tab “Mount Points” it’s probably because you don’t have all the right packages installed. It didn’t appear for me till I added “block-mount”.

openwrt add usbNext reboot your router and make sure the usb device comes up mounted correctly on the above page. At this point it may be a good idea just to do a blank page print to your printer to ensure everything is still working fine. Okay next step!

Configure CUPs to use your USB device for print jobs

Time to re-edit your CUPs config. Either use VI or your text editor of choice and edit your cupsd.conf file:

nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

Change:
RequestRoot /var/cups
TempDir /var/cups

I changed both to /usb/cups/ since as you can see in the above screen cap I mounted my usb drive as /usb

You probably should restart CUPs now.Do this by:
root@OpenWrt:~# /etc/init.d/cupsd restart

Also if at some point you’ve restarted your device and CUPs hasn’t started, do either of the following:

enter “/etc/init.d/cupsd enable” or alternatively in the gui go to System > Started, and make sure cupsd has enabled beside it.

Speaking of cleaning up
Could be a good point to get rid of those default printers you’re not using.

Firstly stop the cups service: /etc/init.d/cupsd stop

I just commented out the printers doing nano /etc/cups/printers.conf and putting a # beside them eg #<Printer LP> and #<DefaultPrinter USB> syslog will throw up a couple of errors on start up but that shouldn’t matter. Alternatively just delete everything for the two defaults.
Then do:
/etc/init.d/cupsd start

Adding the printers on a Mac Client.
I had issues adding the printers through the default mac config, but then suddenly remembered that Macs actually run a local version of CUPs so I just added them by going into the web browser http://127.0.0.1:631 and adding the printers in there! Works great!

 

Hopefully you made it this far, and have a working version of CUPs on your wireless router! Congrats!

Got an issue that you’ve been stuck in for hours?  Always try doing some debug, E.g. via the web interface, go Status > System Log, or Kernel Log. Both of which can be pretty helpful.

As a last resort, if you’ve really stuffed things up, a fresh install might be the way to go. Fixed things for me!

Got any questions? feel free to write below.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————
Other Resources:

Quite a good guide if you’re wanting to use p910nd as your print server:
– http://chee-yang.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/make-host-based-usb-printer-work-with.html

USB flash drive on OpenWRT 10.03 Backfire HOWTO:
– http://asomewhatintegratedlife.blogspot.co.nz/2010/09/usb-flash-drive-on-openwrt-1003.html

Other CUPs on OpenWrt install guides around the web:
– www.newren.com.au/ibbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=392
– http://9m2tpt.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/cups-hl-2140-usb-printer-wzr-hp-g300nh.html

Another all in one guide which covers pretty much everything except a print server:
– http://knowhow.bart.prokop.name/install/openwrt/wr1043nd

how to do DNS host lookup without entering the full domain

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This post is for those running a Microsoft DNS Server

This is a stupid thing that has been bugging me but I never really made the effort to look into it. I used to know how to do this since I actually did a Microsoft course that covered DNS yet I just couldn’t remember how to set this up properly.

So you’re in your web browser or you want to ping a device on your network and you only want to put in the hostname, without the FQDN. Turns out it’s very simple.

Open up DNS manager (Start > Administrative Tools > DNS)

What you want to do is right click Reverse Lookup Zones, and click New Zone.

Click Next.

Depending on how you have DNS set up (say you have more than one MS DNS server) you may need to configure this differently, but I imagine you’ll probably be the same as me, which is selecting “Primary Zone”, and “Store the Zone in Active Directory” ticked > Next.

Again, choose the Zone Replication that suits your AD/DNS set up, Next.

Choose IPv4 or IPv6 reverse lookup. Hopefully a no brainer for you.

Now we’re finally at the screen that matters. This is where you put the IP subnet where your Forward Lookup Zone resides in. As you can see above, my domain is mattie47.lan, which has devices just in the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet. I believe you will need to do a Reverse lookup zone for each subnet you want to resolve to that has devices in, so go through all these steps, finish, then start again for the next subnet (I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m right…).

Click next once you’ve filled it in. The next screen again will be specific to your set up. Finally click finish.

For me, things just worked, but you may need to set up pointers (either double click each Host A record, and tick the box, or go under your new reverse lookup zone > right click > New Pointer.

Hope this helped someone!

Ipv6 OSPFv3 Summary-Prefix command

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This is an interesting OSPFv3 command. There are some things you can and can’t do with it. It behaves the same as IPv4 OSPF (from what I can see).

Say you want to advertise just a single address from a range within a set of subnets, but you don’t want the rest of the subnets appearing in neighbor tables, you can do:

summary-address 1be1::/16 not-advertise
summary-address 1be1:5::/32

Alternatively, you can’t do the following:

summary-address 1be1:5::/32 not-advertise
summary-address 1be1::/16

This is because neighbor routing tables will simply see the 1be1::/16 route, therefore making the 1be1:5::/32 network still reachable. This is confirmed by pinging devices in the 1be1:5::/32 network.

Note: On some other vendors the command is Summary-address.