The Area 0

Ever have to think up a strong password for a critical system, and wonder just how secure the password is? Well the guys over at www.passwordmeter.com have come up with a system that checks your password and scores it based on things like number of characters, number of consecutive upper/lower case characters, etc.

No word yet on whether they use AJAX or something to store these passwords, and the site isn’t SSL protected, so use at your own risk. Definitely a neat application, though.

Pakistan removed from the Internet by ZDNet’s Richard Stiennon — 4:30 PM Eastern (US). The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan’s traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP’s […]

Why did I use the title I did? Well… if the idiots overseas didn’t feel it necessary to cheat on their certification exams using things like Testking and Pass4Sure, they might have known how to solve the issue at the source, rather then doing something stupid and drastic.

Check out the IRC conversation I had today. First the guy argues, and then he proves my point completely.

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Today we ran into an issue with our BGP advertisements. To give you a little history, we were allocated 198.49.81.0/24 and 198.49.82.0/24 back in 1993, which was pre-CIDR. (I bet you can see where this is going, already.)

We have been using 198.49.81.0/24 for a number of years, obviously longer then I’ve been at PSU. I was told that we’d never used the “other half” of our assigned IP space. I knew we had two blocks, and earlier this summer I had asked our ISP:

“Should we not be using 198.49.80.0/23?” I did the math a couple times. I checked ipcalc, I knew it was correct. So not realizing that we didn’t own the 198.49.80.0/24 space, we went ahead and advertised 198.49.80.0/23 via BGP. The ISP didn’t catch it, either. A simple mistake.

In the days of CIDR, of course we would be given the /23! It would be just silly not to. In fact, 198.49.80.0/24 is unallocated. It was a simple case of not realizing that the addresses were pre-CIDR, and therefore not contained by a contiguous bit boundary. OOPS.

It wasn’t a big deal to fix it, we simply added the two correct prefixes to our BGP advertisements, and our ISP simply filtered the /23 we were also advertising. There is some more work to be done upstream, I am told, but everything is working as it should at this point.

Props to Cort at KanREN for spotting the issue, and helping us get it resolved.

Need a reason to replace that old hunk of junk 2500 series router? Or maybe some old thinnet devices? Well here’s your solution: simply apply 120VAC to said device - oh, and not where you’d normally apply it, either.

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If there was ever a network tool that I feel every Cisco engineer should have at their disposal, it would be Dynamips. Dynamips is a piece of software that runs as a server on your Unix, Mac or Windows machine. You write text-based configuration files using Dynagen, and it loads up those configurations using an actual IOS image. That’s right - it runs an actual IOS binary on emulated hardware, unlike most simulators out there that only emulate IOS software.

I highly recommend visiting their website, as well as this forum which is an excellent place to get support. You can also read a tutorial for getting started with Dynamips and Dynagen here. Oh, and we’re always around on IRC. Visit #cisco on irc.freenode.net, where you will find me (IPv6Freely) as well as the creator of Dynamips, cfilliot.