IT Orca: Copper River IT Tech Blog

What, no more DHCP required?  Well, sort of...

In the world of IPv6, the opportunity arises to simply plug in a computer (that has an IPv6 stack enabled), and have that computer automatically learn what the network address is, and assign itself a unique host ID on that subnet and learn the default gateway to use as well.

The wonder of MPLS L3 VPNs

There are a lot of moving parts involved to allow L3 VPNs to work across a service provider's network, allowing a customer to have connectivity between 2 sites using any IP addressing that they choose.

The inside story.

There are a few really cool behind the scenes activities, going on all the time, with IPv6.    In this video we take a look at the process of neighbor discovery, multicast and duplicate address detection (aka DAD)

How many addresses do we really need?

In IPv4, when we configured an IP address on an interface, it was simple.   We configured one, and got one.   Easy and straight forward.   With IPv6, on a new interface, when we first enable an interface for IPv6 by configuring a global IPv6 address there, the router will also dynamically add a second address, called the "link-local" address.

What's in Your Address?

Can you imagine a world where none of the houses or apartments were given addresses? One of the challenges would be that we would never receive mail, and that may or may not be a bad thing.  :)

Who Needs Fault Tolerance?

One of the popular themes in computers and networking his fault tolerance. It basically boils down to the ability for a system to have a single fault, and tolerate it or survive it.

What is in a name?

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a name like “Super Dave”, “Exciting Ellen” or “Fantastic Fred”?   Well, there is a suite of protocols out there that have such a name, and it is “Dynamic Multipoint VPN” or DMVPN as his friends call him.

We are very happy to announce that our instructor-led and mLearning (mobile learning) CCENT, CCNA, and CCIE classes are now live and open for registration.  Click here to check them out!

Hello from Amsterdam!

Back to the land of IPv4, for a moment, for this blog post.

One of the questions that comes up all the time is regarding providing a default route, and which options will work, and when to use them.  The three primary candidates are:

Won't you be my Neighbor?

How important are good neighbors to you?

In a link state network, with routing protocols such as OSPF, becoming neighbors is critical to exchanging routing information.  In a perfect world all routers would share the correct routing updates and would have full connectivity all the time. In the real world there are several things that must happen for OSPF to work properly.