If you are curious here is the pin out to make a passive Ethernet tap;

If you are interested in making your own tap Google for “passive ethernet tap”  Most parts can be found in a home depot or similar homes good store.  If not you can definitely order them on line.  I usually would suggest building a few and leaving them in key parts of your lab or home network topology.  You do not need to leave the sniffer connected for them to function.

Thankfully I recently received a hardware based network tap, which allows me to sniff using one physical interface and only one capture file.  Life has just gotten so much easier in the old home lab environment.

A few weeks ago I added two Catalyst 5000′s to my home lab.  However, right now they are living in our data center to assist in pre-cutover testing.  While not completely and apple to apple comparison, the Catalyst 5000 with an RSM module in hybrid mod is similar to the Catalyst 6506 in hybrid mode.

Besides that some progress was made testing new Cisco 2611′s that will be replacing the 2610 in the home lab.  Over the next few weeks I will be swapping out my all ten of my 2610′s for ten new to me 2611′s.  All of these routers, with the exception of one or two 2610′s are running at max DRAM and FLASH.  The 26xx platform is really only useful when you max out its memory so you can run a 12.3 IOS with 802.1Q trunking support.

When setting up my home lab I generally view things like power and console cables as items that can be pretty static and unchanging.

Either way good to get time in on the lab.  Wanted to play around with MST a bit; however, I did not have the time to do up those configurations.  Hopefully I can revist that topic a bit later.

Later this week hopefully I should have two or three 2611 routers arriving.  I’m unsure what level of memory these new routers will arrive with; however, all things considered I paid very little for them, that adding a few memory upgrades still keeps them within a reasonable price.

Depending on the condition of the 2611 that arrive in I may be swapping out 2610 routers.   I save all my old memory and flash in static bags, in a parts bin when I upgrade devices.  If I pull out a few 2610 I may depending on the eBay prices post a few up for sale to off set the recent lab purchases.

Generally when I get gear in I will tag it with a little paper tag and put it into a test router.  The tag lets me know where I got the part from.  So far I have not had any failed parts or needed to send them back to sellers for refunds.  The first basic test I do is of course, does it show up in the router?  Then I’ll configure the interfaces with static addresses.  If I have a lot of devices to test that day I will configure some quick dynamic routing protocols and start pings between all the interfaces.  The goal is to get a fairly full mesh setup going, with packets originating and arriving at each interface.  Once the packets are sent I will check the interfaces for errors.  No errors, then I assume it is fairly good hardware.

Now all I need is my verrtical cablemanagement pieces and a few more 1U and 0U pieces.  I found what appears to be some nice 0U items at a network surplus web store.  Hopefully they will arrive tomorrow or early next week.  Stinks that Monday is a holiday!  Screws up shipping.  However, I’m looking forward to our family cookout.

Here are a few short PDF documents, which I tend to keep handy or re-read;

• Understanding the Ping and Traceroute Commands
• Using the Extended ping and Extended traceroute Commands

Lately I have been going back to those documents due an on going latency and general network degradation of service investigation at work. At work we have a very mixed environment in regards to both age of equipment and also the vendors who provide the equipment. Wishing some vendors would step up the quality of their products and provide simple things like the ability to run a debug ip packet command in IOS.

Most of my energy lately has been focused on the actual racking aspects of my gear. I ditched two relay racks, which I had gotten used several months ago. What replaced them was one brand spanking new Chatsworth standard black 19″ relay rack. The primary reason for replacing the previous racks was that the previous owner(s) had done a good job of stripping out some of the pre-threaded holes. If I was racking up 4U servers, or only sparsely populating the rack, I may have been able to utilize it longer. Given that reason for replacing the rack, I talked myself into buying nearly 300 12-24 threaded screws for the new rack(s). So far my only disappointment in the rack is that the advertised rack U space markings were done in a teal color, which is barely readable on the black coated rack.

One thing to note is that black racks and screws are coated, whether it is painted, powder coated or anodized, metal does not come out of the forge black. I found it worth while screwing in the screws once prior to mounting the gear, which caused the coating inside the threaded hole and on the screw itself to wear away with out the weight / positioning of gear causing the screws to incorrectly thread and strip out the holes.

Most of the gear went back into the new rack without any sort of problem or inconvenience, except the cursed Cisco 2600 gear. The brackets from Cisco and after market providers just did not align well with the new rack and screws. Like a carpenter I measured and squared that rack three or four times and compared it to the old rack. No perceivable difference, with the exception of the 12-24 threaded screws. The ultimate solution was to experiment with the file in my leatherman by filing away about 1/16″ of an inch of metal from both brackets. Once the filing was done the routers fit in without a problem. Unfortunately the file in the leatherman, like most of its flip out tools really stinks. One trip to HomeDepot and I had the proper tools. About an hour later and I had modified 8 sets of brackets.

Outside of the rack, I have been working eBay over pretty hard sourcing what hopefully will be my final Cisco NM and WIC modules. Found a lot of good deals and plenty of bad ones, which I completely avoided. Some of the gear has started arriving; however, most of the people I have bought from seem to be slow on shipping, or wanted to clarify the items they had posted.

The last headache has been planned electrical outages in our city. NSTAR who provides our electricity has had several Thursday midnight to 6 AM planned electrical outages. As I wrap up this post I can only hope they are not about to flip that all important set of uber breakers. Unfortunately for me I’m still working on sourcing and refreshing some aged battery backup equipment for the home office and lab.

Lastly I will leave you with this little bit of advice, if you are selling on eBay do not ship WIC or NM modules in cardboard priority mail envelopes. The NM and WIC modules will arrive bent and probably damaged and unusable!