This command causes the card to crash:
# conf t
conf# interface gi1/0/1.111
conf(subif)# encapsulation dot1q 11 second-dot1q 11

Yes, that’s right. It will let you configure QinQ routing but it will crash.

What I uncovered today was that it uses the same mac address on all it’s interfaces including EoMPLS connections. This causes nasty mac-flap issues if you tunnel your vlans in a layer-2 network. Ouch!

So, if you plan on using this interface, change all mac addresses on each interface before you start…
Nice one, Cisco…

I am a guy of this digital day of age. Work with computers and technology, spend the majority of my life interacting with the digital world in some form or another, be it on my computer on the internet, on one of my many gadgets or something else. I am like most people of  my generation.

I was born in the mid 80′s. I had a few film cameras in the very cheap end of the scale, but managed to score myself a digital camera working for the high school newspaper, not that I was very impressed with it’s pictures, since it was a compact camera from year 2000, but it was a cool thing to have. Convenient, and with previews of my pictures. I took distorted pictures, manipulated them in photoshop and called it art. The first couple of pictures on my old deviantart profile are from that time: http://eising.deviantart.com. I was never very serious with photography.

A few years later I got myself my own digital camera, took it with me on my various trips abroad, and told my friends that it was a good camera because it had a whooping 7.2 megapixels.

Fast forward some years , I got myself a real DSLR. It took pretty pictures and I conveniently loaded them onto the computer, edited them and put them on my flickr, facebook or where ever.

Then something happened. Someone introduced me to film. I was intrigued both with the style of old cameras and with the pictures found on flickr from people claiming to shoot film.

I started to shoot film. I got myself some cameras. Started by buying a plastic camera, then got a TLR, and finally I got myself a real SLR.

The real revelation came when I started to print my film in the darkroom. The process in which you take your negative, blow it up and manipulate it until it becomes something you are proud of is just such a fulfilling task that it has blown me away. It takes a while to learn, and I only started to get a hang of it about a month ago.

I suppose in this digital time, getting a physical product in your hand is much more fulfilling than a virtual product on the internet.

I do not have many of my enlargements online, but soon something new is going to happen with my online photographic presence soon. Keep an eye out.

I have my RB750 running at home. It participates in the office VPN network through split tunnelled IPSec. Today I had to check something out on my router at home, while being in the office, but I could not connect to it, and continuously got a port unreachable error, which was a bit weird.

When I came home, I sniffed on the wan interface to figure out what was going on, and I found out that because I matched on in-interface in my NAT rules, it would also include ipsec traffic there. D’oh! So, let’s say my lan network is 192.168.1.0/24, and I have a pc on 192.168.1.10. I have a dst-nat rule pointing port 22 incoming on the wan side of the router to 192.168.1.10. If I ssh from 192.168.1.10 to 192.168.1.1, I will have access to the routers cli, while if I ssh to 192.168.1.1 from the other side of the ipsec tunnel, it will be forwarded to 192.168.1.10. The reason I saw the port unreachable message was because the NAT rule pointed to a PC that wasn’t  on… Brilliant.

So, let me write this in bold letters: Firewall rules, including NAT that match your WAN interface, will ALSO match your IPSec traffic!

If you need to match WAN traffic, match your WAN IP address instead of the ingress interface!

So, instead of this NAT rule:
/ip firewall nat add chain=dst-nat action=dst-nat in-interface=ether1 protocol=tcp dst-port=22 to-addresses=192.168.1.10

Do this:
/ip firewall add chain=dst-nat action=dst-nat dst-address=11.22.33.44 protocol=tcp dst-port=22 to-addresses=192.168.1.10

This was today’s service message from your friendly neighbourhood network guy.

The disadvantage of Digital Photography

Digital photography has been around for some years now. I got access to my first digital camera – I don’t even remember the brand -  when I was the photographer for the school magazine in highschool some eight years ago. It was a two megapixel wonder that was quite bulky and didn’t take very good pictures, but they were digital, so I could just drag and drop them into the articles. This is exactly why digital got so popular. With the rise of the internet there was a strong demand for being able to share your photos and all that. I will not go into details here, it’s basically common knowledge. Anyway, we have all been witnessing a megapixel war. Cell phones came with a camera from around 2003 in Denmark, as far as I can remember. They were not very good and most of them took pictures in a VGA-like resolution of around 800×600. Since then, there has been a competition of who could cram the largest number of megapixels into these tiny CCD chips.

Digital SRL’s were introduced also and they had a smaller sensor than their 35MM parents. Their format largely resembled the APS Classic film format with a sensor size of 25.1 × 16.7 mm, and cell phones with cameras in reality just followed along the already raging megapixel war that went on between digital cameras in general. unfortunately, it was largely perceived that the more megapixels your camera had, the better it was. In my eyes this megapixel war has been fought with general image quality as the big loser. The level of contrast rendition on a modern digital camera is still sup par of any comparable film camera, hence the overrated HDR technique came in use. Often digital cameras weren’t able to capture a full daylight scene without either blowing away the sky or darkening the foreground objects too much.

HDR utilized an old trick for bad photographers called bracketing. Bracketing allows you to automatically take a number of photos with different exposure settings, mostly a combination of darker and  brighter exposure settings. Taken on a tripod of a static scene these images could be merged together exposing both foreground and background. Unfortunately this has been over used, especially with a technique knows as tone mapping where every element in a scene would be highlighted beyond recognition. Look through the HDR groups in Flickr if you need some examples of what I’m talking about, but keep bleach handy and apply to the eyes if necessary.

These limitations of the DSLRs and the digital format in general has led to many people taking up film photography instead.

LOMO and all that

LOMO is an interesting artistic movement that preaches spontaneous photography with cheap plastic cameras. It is in many ways a movement that has many similarities towards everything that has to do with being hip and fashion, but as an expression it has some very interesting facets. The Diana camera was a plastic camera from the 60′s and 70′s and produces pictures that express what we connect to that era in amateur photography. This form of expression is also present in other forms of art. Music would be a good example, where the sound of 70′s analogue synthesizers are an often sought effect.

The whole LOMO movement can also be seen as a direct counter-movement of the well-polished modern photography, where everything needs to be perfect. Modern photographers spend hours polishing their pictures in Photoshop and spending thousands of dollars on expensive optics and lighting gear.

With a lomographic camera you get a camera that has almost no settings, where everything is made of plastic, including the optics and no batteries are required, creating a whole new view of photography, where only the motive and composition needs attention.

The rules of lomography encourage people to shoot spontaneously, even from the hip. Such guidelines are not well-seen in digital photography. Countless blogs gives you detailed instructions that go over many steps in order to set up the scene for one picture. Here you shoot from the hip and hope something interesting comes out of it.

While I do not necessarily condone just shooting pictures without thinking or having ideas, the simplified camera gives you a new perspective on photography. You can use the spontaneousness of the format to shoot whenever something interesting appears instead of staging everything to create the frame for a so called perfect shot.

I’ve shot the first six rolls of 120 medium format film but have yet to see the results. I must admit that I really enjoy walking around with the plastic camera with the oversized flash. It attracts people and it’s easy to get people to pose for a picture. I’ve been drooling over the 6×6 medium format lately and I can’t wait to get my pictures developed. In time, I will be setting up my own darkroom and scanning the negatives myself. There is no point in printed pictures if you ask me. Everything needs to be online in this age.

The Diana camera gives you pictures with iconic vignetting as well as occasional light leaks and other flaws that are really a part of the charm. This is not perfect photography, but we find beauty in the imperfect.  The many modifications to the Diana camera makes it very versatile. With the kit I got a number of lenses, including fish eye, wide angles, close up and tele zoom . It uses 120 medium format film but a 35mm back was supplied in the kit as well. It was a great purchase if you ask me, and I’ll be sure to update this blog with any pictures I take as soon as they get developed.

I would like to hear your view on this article, and if you disagree with my less than thorough analysis of things here, please leave a comment and I’ll be sure to answer whatever comments you might have.

UPDATE:

The photos have been relocated to this url: http://photos.sxi.dk/v/August+2009/

If you can’t find my old cisco howto, it’s here: http://eising.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/leaking-specific-routes-between-vrfs/

• I bought my first DSLR two month ago. My father invited me to go with him to Nepal on holiday, so I did not want to go there without a proper camera. Having a little saved up on my bank account, I went to the local photography shop without knowing much about DSLR’s, if anything at all. The clerk recommended a Nikon D60 to me, which I bought along with an extra lens. I’ve come to regret that purchase a lot because of the many limitations of the D60. The biggest limitation was that it didn’t auto focus with older Nikon AF lenses, which forced me to buy the newest (and therefore most expensive) lenses if I was to acquire new lenses. Now, two month later, I bought a new camera house to circumvent this limitation, and I’ve got a pretty impressive collection for a newbie already:

Cameras:

• Nikon D90
• Nikon D60
• Nikon F801 (ancient)

Lenses:

• Nikkor AF-S 18-55 f/3.5-5.6G (D60 kit lens)
• Nikkor AF-S 55-200 f/4-5.6
• Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6
• Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4 (ancient, but fantastic mf lens)

I’m also currently borrowing the Nikkor AFD 105mm f/2.8 macro, which I’m in love with.

Accessories:

• Manfrotto 190XPROB tripod, with Manfrotto 486rc2 ball head.
• Marumi Linear Polarizer.
• Nikon ML-L3 infrared remote trigger.

If you are interested in seeing some of the photos I’ve taken, check out http://flickr.com/aeising

I’m very much in danger of becoming an equipment fetishist, and there are a few things I feel I need apart from lens upgrades, those things include a better flash (Nikon SB-600, probably) and a battery grip, but the current kit should give me room to focus on taking pictures in a great variety of circumstances. The only reason to pack an expensive kit like this, should be to open up new photographic possibilities that would normally be hard to perfect without.

I was on my way home after playing in the orchestra, walking from Nørrebro to Nørreport station, when I decided to take a shortcut through the bike storage facility that connect to the metro. The moment I open the door, I notice a man around 19-20 years old, along with two girls sitting inside. I couldn’t react before he ran towards me, grabbed me and started to beat me up. He told me to shut up and give him my wallet. At that time, I realized to keep calm and do exactly as he told me to. Seeing that I didn’t have any cash, he forced me to the ATM machine inside the metro station, where he made me withdraw 6000 kroner in cash, and took my card and forced me to reveal my pin code. He even took a picture of me with his camera phone and threatened to kill me if I called the police.

I did call the police, of course. They were really friendly after they heard what had happened, and gave me a ride home. Unfortunately the surveillance camera within the bike facility had been turned away from anything useful, but I am pretty sure that there are plenty of cameras in the vicinity of the ATM machine.

All in all, I’m a bit in a shock, and I try to deal with it as good as I can.  My head is a bit swollen, and I got a black eye. I thought I had a very light concussion, but I’m not so sure anymore. The insurance should cover the money, so there’s no issues there.

This is the first time anything of that kind has happened to me. I took the day off, and am sitting at home at the moment. Mathias came home soon after I arrived last night and talked the whole thing through with me, and Hjalte made breakfast for me this morning. It’s good to have good friends. Also Astrid was nice enough to lend a patient ear to my inconsistent babbling, and she was the first one I called yesterday.

One principle that I stand with after this experience, is that I do not wish to let this effect me negatively in any way. I do not with to adobt any totalitarian ideas, or start having a need to learn how to defend myself, become paranoid or anything in that way. I say so because I had a class mate in elementary school who was beat down by a robber as well, and he changed. He became arrogant and cruel towards those who he deemed inferior to him, probably as an act of stimulating his own sense of pride and superiority, redeeming any sort of trauma he might have gone through on the expense of others.

I shall remain who I’ve always been. I shall keep my possitive spirit and my sense of humor and that will be the way to deal with this.

If you want to run a multi-vrf setup with overlapping address space, you might be wondering how to do the surveilance and management of the CE devices. Obviously, you can’t set up a separate NMS system per VRF, and doing NAT from all CE devices into a non-overlapping address pool is just not an option. Here’s what I came up with – it’s been tested on dynamips and I’ve included the .net file for dynagen also.

My example topology looks like this:

Topology

It works in the following way:

• You define a vrf per customer as usual
• You define a management VRF
• Your customer VRF imports the management MP-BGP extended community
• Your customer VRF exports the management routes using a route-map that sets the extcommunity rd to a new value (a CPE route-target) – see example below
• Your management VRF imports this CPE extcommunity as a route-target

A customer vrf definition would look like this:

!
ip vrf customer1
rd 99:100
export map management
route-target export 99:100
route-target import 99:100
route-target import 99:99
!

The 99:99 MP-BGP extended community is the route-distinguisher of your management vrf.

The export map route-map looks like this:

!
route-map management permit 10
match ip address management
set extcommunity rt  99:98 additive
!

match ip address management is a regular standard ACL that matches 172.16.1.0/24.

Your management VRF looks like this:

ip vrf management
rd 99:99
route-target export 99:99
route-target import 99:99
route-target import 99:98
!

This is actually the basics of it. You can find the full config of one of the PE here.

The dynagen .net file including all configs are here.

I hope you can use it!

First of all, your system will survive the upgrade just fine. Yum reported that it only needed to pull seven packages from rawhide, so there is nothing wrong with doing it. After the install, you would want to upgrade your database, as RT has changed quite a bit since 3.6. Now the rt-setup-database tool expects to find the upgrade files in the original source directory, with a file structure as ./etc/upgrade.

Fedora puts these files in /etc/rt3/upgrade, thus rt-setup-database –action upgrade will not be able to find the files. You need to go into /etc/rt3 and type the following:

# mkdir /etc/rt3/etc
# cd /etc/rt3/etc
# ln -s /etc/rt3/upgrade upgrade
# rt-setup-database –dba root –prompt-for-dba-password –action upgrade

Now follow the on-screen dialog and everything should work.

There’s a few customization tasks you could do afterwards, especially, I wanted to change the default stylesheet to the old one, as I find the new style horrible. Add the following to RT_SiteConfig.pm:

Set($WebDefaultStylesheet, ’3.5-default’);