Tag Archives: VLAN

CCNP SWITCH Lab show commands

Second post of this little series. While I was using my CCNP SWITCH lab for testing many different protocols, I “showed” and saved the output of those protocols as well. Refer to the lab overview of my last post in order to understand those outputs.

I basically saved them as a reference for myself in case I am interested in the information revealed by them. I won’t explain any details of the protocols nor the outputs here. Just many listings. Fly over them and reflect yourself whether you would understand anything. ;) Here we go:

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Wireshark Layer 2-3 pcap Analysis w/ Challenges (CCNP SWITCH)

While preparing for my CCNP SWITCH exam I built a laboratory with 4 switches, 3 routers and 2 workstations in order to test almost all layer 2/3 protocols that are related to network management traffic. And because “PCAP or it didn’t happen” I captured 22 of these protocols to further investigate them with Wireshark. Oh oh, I remember the good old times where I merely used unmanaged layer 2 switches. ;)

In this blogpost I am publishing the captured pcap file with all of these 22 protocols. I am further listing 46 CHALLENGES as an exercise for the reader. Feel free to download the pcap and to test your protocol skills with Wireshark! Use the comment section below for posting your answers.

Of course I am running my lab fully dual-stacked, i.e., with IPv6 and legacy IP. On some switches the SDM template must be changed to be IPv6 capable such as sdm prefer dual-ipv4-and-ipv6 default .

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FortiGate: Software-/ Hardware-/ VLAN-Switch

I am still a bit confused about the different switch types a FortiGate firewall is able to handle. While there is a lot of information on the Internet about the “internal-switch-mode” of “switch/interface“, I have not found any good information about the differences between the “Hardware/Software/VLAN” switch types that are configured via the GUI or via the “virtual-switch-vlan enable” CLI command. Though I still don’t know exactly all differences, I am trying to explain some of them here.

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Minor Palo Alto Bug concerning IPv6 MGT

A few months ago I found a small bug in PAN-OS, the operating system from Palo Alto Networks. It is related to an IPv6 enabled management interface. The MGT address was not reachable when the firewall operates in layer 2 mode, that is, had layer 2 interfaces along with VLANs. Luckily, this bug is fixed with the new software version 6.1.2 which was released this week (bug ID 67719).

Following are a few listings that show the incomplete handling of the IPv6 neighbor cache of the MGT interface in the old version (pre 6.1.2).

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