Junos QoS notes

Juniper refers to QoS as Class of Service (CoS) and it is something that I’ve always had trouble quite getting my head around for some reason.  Sure – I’ve got CoS working nicely on switches and SRXes in customer networks, with packets hitting the right queues and so on, but you’re never quite sure it is exactly right.

Studying for my JNCIP-SP, I did a practice exam on the Juniper website and it seems that CoS is something I am weak in, so I am writing up some notes here for my own reference.

Nice feature – cable test on Junos EX switch

There are some really nice features about EX switches, and I only just got round to giving this one a go.  You can run a port test – in the screenshots below it is ge-0/0/3 – and one of the tests run will tell you how far it is to the cable break.  This is a Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR) test.  In the example, it shows 17 metres to the break – so I can tell that there’s probably a cable from the port to the patch panel, but nothing plugged-in at the wall-port.

Shoreware Director – TMSNcc.log file notes

Just had a useful session with a Shoretel TAC guy – the problem being dropped calls when using Shoreware Communicator.  The diagnosis was that there is too much jitter on the network, and it was TmsNcc.log that showed up the problem:

Shoretel Client Debugging

Sometimes it is necessary to debug issues from the client perspective, so here is a quick guide with screenshots on how to do this.

First you switch on the debugging, then wait until the problem recurs. When it does, note the exact time the problem happened and generate a zip file containing the logs for your support people to analyse.

The steps are described in detail below.

Shoretel TMS event ID 246

We’ve been consistently getting an informational event in our Director’s logs from TMS over the past few weeks and until now, I wasn’t sure where it was coming from.  Finally got to the bottom of it the other day though, with a bit of help from a colleague.  It seems that a mis-configured SIP device was probably the issue.

Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade – bit of a pain in the a**

Just upgraded to 11.10 (from 11.4) over night and it all looked good until a reboot while eating toast this morning.  Pretty disappointing, and this has cost me about 3 hours of my day so far.

The system booted up but said “waiting for network” or something like that in the Ubuntu splash screen.  It then said “Waiting another 60 seconds for network” and never came to a login prompt.  If you press escape at that point, you can see that there’s some kind of DBUS problem.

Interesting – well, only if you’re really boring.

Just upgrading Junos from 10.4R6 to 11.1R2 to resolve a particularly intractable IPSec VPN issue (there’s a Cisco ASA involved).  I just noticed that all the 10.4 releases of Junos for branch SRX are about 210MB, but the new 11.1 releases are 136MB.  Makes me wonder what the hell they’ve taken out.  Hopefully nothing to do with IPSec:

-rw-r--r-- 1 andrew andrew 210M 2011-02-28 16:01 junos-srxsme-10.4R2.7-domestic.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 andrew andrew 211M 2011-05-06 11:02 junos-srxsme-10.4R3.4-domestic.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 andrew andrew 211M 2011-09-01 10:27 junos-srxsme-10.4R6.5-domestic.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 andrew andrew 137M 2011-05-05 09:55 junos-srxsme-11.1R1.10-domestic.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 andrew andrew 137M 2011-06-06 17:00 junos-srxsme-11.1R2.3-domestic.tgz

 

Linux backup stuff

Booted my PC up with a Linux CD yesterday afternoon to do a ‘dd’ image of the hard disk so that I have a checkpoint in time to image my machine back to.  Only thing is, it was still only halfway through making the 300GB image by 9am this morning after running all night. 

Nice post on Shoretel QoS settings

This is a really useful post.  Just sticking it here for reference…

Juniper SRX – Dynamic VPN Wizard

Just managed to set up a Juniper Dynamic VPN using the web interface’s wizard in about half an hour – bonzer compared to the last time I did it at the CLI, which seemed to take two days.

There are a couple of things to watch out for though.