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Dec 30 / Greg

Power Requirements For Cisco Aironet

You can see the chart here.

I have 3 6500 chassis full of PoE blades(WS-X6348-RJ-45). All of them are slightly older and supply only prestandard power. The cards are only able to supply 7 watts max per port, which means you can basically power phones and light APs. I found that my aironet 1200s weren’t staying powered up. I kept getting:

“009267: *Dec 29 16:02:31.576 CST: %ILPOWER-5-ILPOWER_POWER_DENY: Interface Fa9/29: inline power denied”

This error translates to “You are asking for too much power.”

Turns out I had the optional black stripe panel antenna installed which pushed the power consumption just above the 7 watt max. I pulled those dudes out and everything is now A-OK.

Dec 27 / Greg

Mikrotik V5.0rc6

It looks like this was mostly IPv6 support update as well as some nv2 fixes.

*) ntp server now requires a broadcast address for broadcast mode to work
it should be specified under broadcast-addresses (X.X.X.255),
255.255.255.255 is not going to work;
*) ssh – fixed showing forwarding settings,
check your setting after upgrade!
*) allow to specify multiple networks (including IPv6)
in user’s allowed-from list;
*) added support for Safe Mode to WinBox;
Couldn’t live without it!
*) allow to specify non acceptable groups for RADIUS console logins;
*) handle correctly IPv6 address on bridged or switched interfaces;
*) added IPv6 connection list;
*) added IPV6 support to graphing;
*) added IPv6 support to SNTP client;
*) added IPv6 support to NTP client & server;
*) added IPv6 support to RADIUS client;
*) added IPv6 support to snmp;
*) added IPv6 support to tftp server, also changed logging levels;
*) added IPv6 support to ssh client;
*) added IPv6 support to watchdog;
*) added IPv6 support for /tool e-mail;
*) added IPv6 support to log remote target;
*) added IPv6 support to API;
*) added IPv6 support to winbox;
*) added IPv6 support to ftpd;
*) added IPv6 support to netwatch;
*) added IPv6 support for /queue simple;
*) added IPv6 support for /tool bandwidth-test;
*) added IPv6 support for /tool torch;
*) added IPv6 support for /interface vrrp (version 3);
*) added IP/IPv6 over ipv6 tunnel interface (/interface ipipv6);
*) added Ethernet over IPv6 tunnel interface (/interface eoipv6);
*) snmp – added ipv6AddrTable from IPV6-MIB;
*) wireless nv2 – fixed station-wds mode multicast problem;
*) wireless nv2 – fixed occasional encrypted link stalls;

Here’s the torrent for all of you that still have access.

Dec 20 / Greg

Mikrotik Bridging Networks With Full Duplex Wireless Links

The other day I had a question…”How can I bridge two networks using full duplex wireless links?” Another stipulation was to also use OSPF. Here’s our diagram:

What we want to accomplish is this:

  • Full duplex wireless link
  • Have the same L2 subnet stretched across the devices
  • Have auto link failure recover
  • Step one is to just put the IP addresses on:
    MTK1

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    /ip address
    add address=192.168.1.1/30 broadcast=192.168.1.3 comment="" disabled=no \
        interface=wlan1 network=192.168.1.0
    add address=192.168.1.5/30 broadcast=192.168.1.7 comment="" disabled=no \
        interface=wlan1 network=192.168.1.4

    MTK2

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    /ip address
    add address=192.168.1.2/30 broadcast=192.168.1.3 comment="" disabled=no \
        interface=wlan1 network=192.168.1.0
    add address=192.168.1.6/30 broadcast=192.168.1.7 comment="" disabled=no \
        interface=wlan1 network=192.168.1.4

    Now that we have IP addresses on the interface, make sure you can ping your neighbor 🙂

    Now, lets go ahead and crank on OSPF(Turn on OSPF and set interface costs):
    MTK1

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    /routing ospf network
    add area=backbone comment="" disabled=no network=0.0.0.0/0
     
    /routing ospf interface
    add cost=20 instance-id=0 interface=wlan1 network-type=broadcast passive=no

    MTK2

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    /routing ospf network
    add area=backbone comment="" disabled=no network=0.0.0.0/0
     
    /routing ospf interface
    add cost=20 instance-id=0 interface=wlan2 network-type=broadcast passive=no

    Now we will create our loopback interface (a bridge interface with no ports added):
    MTK1-2

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    /interface bridge
    add admin-mac=00:00:00:00:00:00 ageing-time=5m arp=enabled auto-mac=yes \
        comment="" disabled=no forward-delay=15s l2mtu=65535 max-message-age=20s \
        mtu=1500 name=bridge10 priority=0x8000 protocol-mode=none \
        transmit-hold-count=6

    Now, throw an IP address on our loopback interface:
    MTK1

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    /ip address
    add address=1.1.1.1/32 broadcast=1.1.1.1 comment="" disabled=no interface=\
        bridge10 network=1.1.1.1

    MTK2

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    /ip address
    add address=1.1.1.2/32 broadcast=1.1.1.1 comment="" disabled=no interface=\
        bridge10 network=1.1.1.1

    We are now going to add an EOIP tunnel interface. This tunnel interface will allow us to bridge traffic. The remote address will be set to that of the loopback interface. This way no matter which wireless interface the traffic enters it will always be able to reach the loopback interface!
    MTK1

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    /interface eoip
    add arp=enabled comment="" disabled=no l2mtu=65535 mac-address=\
        02:68:73:AC:10:E1 mtu=1500 name=eoip-tunnel1 remote-address=1.1.1.2 \
        tunnel-id=0

    MTK2

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    /interface eoip
    add arp=enabled comment="" disabled=no l2mtu=65535 mac-address=\
        02:68:73:AC:10:E1 mtu=1500 name=eoip-tunnel1 remote-address=1.1.1.1 \
        tunnel-id=0

    Create a bridge interface to bridge the EOIP tunnel interface over to the ethernet interface and then add the ports to the bridge:
    MTK1-2

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    /interface bridge
    add admin-mac=00:00:00:00:00:00 ageing-time=5m arp=enabled auto-mac=yes \
        comment="" disabled=no forward-delay=15s l2mtu=1526 max-message-age=20s \
        mtu=1500 name=bridge1 priority=0x8000 protocol-mode=none \
        transmit-hold-count=6
    /interface bridge port
    add bridge=bridge1 comment="" disabled=no edge=auto external-fdb=auto \
        horizon=none interface=ether1 path-cost=10 point-to-point=auto priority=\
        0x80
    add bridge=bridge10 comment="" disabled=no edge=auto external-fdb=auto \
        horizon=none interface=eoip-tunnel1 path-cost=10 point-to-point=auto \
        priority=0x80

    So with this configuration we have a full duplex wireless link due to our OSPF cost manipulation. Since the cost is higher on certain interfaces, traffic will choose to flow in a circular pattern through the interfaces that don’t have a cost associated with them. If one of the interfaces fails, OSPF will fail the routing over to the remaining interface.

    Both ether1 interfaces are on the same L2 subnet and have the advantage of higher throughput with link failover.

    Alternatives

    Bonding
    You could bond the wireless interfaces and do L2 round robin to balance the traffic. One concern I have is that you might get some wacky jitter over the wireless links. In theory they should suffer the amount of wireless delay, though 🙂

    Dec 16 / Greg

    Mikrotik Changelog V4.15

    It looks like 4.14 introduced a nice little RB1000 bug and has subsequently been replaced by 4.15. If you have 4.14, I would go ahead and delete it just for safety’s sake.

    *) upgraded broken RB1000 bootloader which was included with v4.14;

    Dec 15 / Greg

    Mikrotik V4.14 Released

    Torrent can be found here.

    Looks like they dropped a quick release to fix a couple of Nv2 issues.

    *) radius – fixed Disconnect and CoA response signature generation;
    *) radius – do not include NAS-Identifier & NAS-IP-Address in
    Disconnect and CoA responses;
    *) added hotspot html variable “host-ip”; => I can’t find anything on this. I’m thinking this will allow you to integrate the IP address the hotspot web page.
    *) wireless nv2 – fixed station-wds mode multicast problem;
    *) wireless nv2 – fixed occasional encrypted link stalls;

    Dec 10 / Greg

    Cisco Communications Manager Express – Call Forward All

    We were recently shutting down an office and needed to forward all calls back out to another office temporarily. What I did was create a fake phone, set it to call forward all and then have all incoming pots lines go to the fake phone. Here’s the setup for the fake phone:

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    ephone-dn 60
    number 60
    call-forward all 95555555555
    Dec 8 / Greg

    Show ASA Config PreHash

    My boy Yeager posted this up ages ago. It basically allows you to show the running config and read the group-policy shared keys. I found with the newest versions you need to run the command like so:

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    more system:running