Tuesday, February 28, 2006

IPv6 routers - what to use at home

I have been using a Cisco 871 router to do most of my IPv6 lab work and I think it is the right choice given the sort of material I am trying to cover. There are however a lot of options out there that are far cheaper and perhaps just as good. I was looking at the OpenWRT site and I think running their kernel release on a Linksys WRT54GS might be the trick. You can find those units for about $30-40 on ebay which is far cheapers then the Cisco 871's which start at about $300 and up. Only problem is that if you have an issue installing the firmware you have a brick - no fun.

I wonder what other hardware folks are using for cheap IPv6 labs. Lots of folks use an old PC and run Zebra or if it will support Windows XP they can run that for a lot of IPv6 services also. Its not like vendors are labeling their gear IPv6 ready in the home/soho market. The OpenWRT stuff seems to run on a lot of hardware platforms so that might be worth a more serious look.
- Ed

Friday, February 17, 2006

My current reading list

Well, for the long weekend I will be of course reading some technical books. Thought someone else might be interested to see what I am currently going through.

Running IPv6 by Iljitsch van Beijnum
Cisco Self-Study: Implementing Cisco IPv6 Networks by Regis Desmeules
Study Guide for the Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching Written Exam by Brad Ellis

That should keep me pretty busy.
- Ed

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

IPv6 running in my lab

I finally got around to getting everything working. I have a /64 from Hurricane Electric through their IPv6 tunnel broker service to my Cisco 871 router. From their I have my router configured with my prefix for my local subnet and I have a Windows XP SP2 machine on that local subnet. I started up IPv6 on my XP machine and get an IPv6 address and I can pass traffic to the IPv6 public Internet! It all works, very cool. When I get a moment I will do a dump of some configuration files and XP screen shots to show how it is configured.
- Ed

Monday, February 06, 2006

Pegasus Mail and Mercury

Pegasus Mail and Mercury MTA are wonderful if you are looking for a low cost method of running an SMTP mail list server. I can't say enough about how cool it is to have a windows based MTA that is free and works well. It is easy to set up and you can install Pegasus Mail on the local machine to check the local postmaster account without using some fancy bloated client.
- Ed

Kiwi - Free Syslog Server and Remote Device Configuration Management Software

Kiwi Syslog Server is a great little application for those that need a more robust syslog server to run on a windows platform. I have run it for several years now and it is top notch.

I would also recommend Kiwi CatTools which is a great little utility for pushing configuration changes out to Cisco Routers and also for backing up the configuration on a regular basis. We do backup's daily of our router and switch gear and CatTools sends us an e-mail report of what changed, what wasn't available and if everything backed up just fine. Great, great tool.
- Ed