All posts by Luke

Hardware, Networking

Configuring a Juniper SRX110 Router

Recently I was configuring a pair of Junipers SRX110s in a cluster configuration and found something that doesnt seem to be documented anywhere else, so I thought I’d share this little gotcha that had me running circles for a little while.

This article http://www.juniper.net/techpubs/en_US/junos12.1/topics/reference/general/chassis-cluster-srx-series-node-interface-understanding.html helpfully gives a table of what the interfaces become when a node is added to the cluster. However it leaves of the SRX110 model.

I, perhaps naively, thought it would behave as per the SRX100 and make the second node fe-1/0/0-7 but it behaves more like the SRX210 and makes the second node fe-2/0/0-7. Explains why I kept getting the error

'fab1' configured wrong interface as fab child

When trying to commit my changes using fe-1/0/5 as a member for fab1. Really wish auto-complete would work at that point of the command would’ve saved me some head banging.

 

When the config is final I’ll paste it up here for reference for anyone else that might be trying to configure one as well.

 

Update: It seems after a bit of work that Cluster mode wont work anyway. There’s several features that aren’t available in cluster mode, and it also looks like Juniper has disabled cluster mode on any JunOS release after 11.2 so you can’t upgrade and get any of the other nice features.

Looks like I’ll end up having to go with 2 separate firewalls and use VRRP and/or routing to make it work with redundancy.

Networking, Software, Virtualization

F5 Buys Linerate Systems

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Recently F5 announced their purchase of Linerate Systems link. So why is this news? Well it’s the latest in a series of purchases by all the major players. VMWare bought Nicira link, Cisco didn’t acquire anyone (yet) but they’re making a lot of SDN noise and Citrix Xen is already built on open vSwitch.

Even the non networking focused vendors are moving; HP has been into SDN almost since it’s inception almost 6 years ago but have gotten more serious recently. IBM are doing it and even Microsoft are dipping their toes into the water although I’m not entirely sure they get it, they seem to just be calling their virtual switching in HyperV SDN which strictly speaking I guess it is.

I’ve already posted about how much I love the concept of SDN and it’s good to see it’s finally starting to get some major traction. Now I wonder how soon before it starts to make its way seriously into the DataCentre.

 

Software

Python based Paymo API

So I think I’ve written before about the cloud based time tracking software I use; Paymo, well I’ve been working on a project to improve the invoicing side of it. Paymo does produce invoices but I find they’re a little bland, and they currently don’t meet the requirements set out by the ATO, so I have to produce my own manually.

This being a time consuming process I thought I’d automate it, and combining another side project I figured why not use it as a chance to improve my Python and Django skills. So it was a very nice relief to find that someone has already written a Python based library to the Paymo API – http://scardine.github.com/paymo/. Although it shouldn’t really come a surprise, part of my deciding what coding language would be a good choice was finding out what kind of community support and adoption each language had. So I guess it’s really confirmation of some research and means I chose wisely; young Jedi.

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