This product is intended to be used as an educational product that provides exposure to the command line interface (CLI) of Cisco devices to practice and learn by discovery.

Packet Tracer 5.3 is the latest version of this Cisco network simulator, and it’s a key tool to use if you are a student pursuing the CCNA or dedicated to networking. This program creates a physical topology of network devices by simply drag-and-drop devices on the worksheet screen. After clicking on them you can access the configuration console of this device. All Cisco IOS commands are supported and even does the “tab completion” on a command. Once the physical and logical configuration of the network is build, you can do simulations of connectivity (ping, traceroute, etc) all from the device’s own console.

Main Features

The improvements to the new Packet Tracer 5.3 are:

* Support for Windows (2000, XP, Vista) and Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora).
* Allows multi-user and collaborative settings in real time.
* Support for IPv6, multi-area OSPF, route redistribution, RSTP, SSH, and multilayer switches.

Supports the following protocols:

* HTTP, Telnet, SSH, TFTP, DHCP and DNS.
* TCP / UDP, IPv4, IPv6, and ICMPv6 ICMPv4.
* RIP, EIGRP, OSPF multi-area, static routing and route redistribution.
* Ethernet 802.3 and 802.11, HDLC, Frame Relay and PPP.
* ARP, CDP, STP, RSTP, 802.1q, VTP, DTP and PAgP.

Cisco is committed to release the TIP protocol:

After the acquisition of Tandberg , Cisco has pledged to release the protocol Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) on 1 July 2010. The draft release will be hosted on Sourceforge under the Apache 2.0 license. This decision is apparently the result of a concession to the European Commission for approval of acquisition of Tandberg.

Cisco completes acquisition of Tandberg

Cisco completed the acquisition of Norwegian company Tandberg, specializing in solutions for video conferencing and telepresence. Tandberg products are now integrated in the Cisco Telepresence product series. The solutions are based primarily on the TIP protocol (Telepresence Interoperability Protocol).

Cisco WebEx Meeting Center available on iPad

After the iPhone version, Cisco announced the availability of WebEx Meeting Center on the iPad. WebEx Meeting Center is a collaborative tool ”that combines professional interaction, voice and instant messaging”. This tool lets “to organize meetings for dispersed staff and using tools and heterogeneous systems”

It’s been an ongoing debate for much of the last 14 years – Cisco or Juniper? Increasingly, that argument will hinge on which router manufacturer has the more compelling unified data center fabric architecture: Cisco’s Unified Computing System or Juniper’s single-layer Stratus.

The Battle Between JUNOS and IOS

The argument began in 1996 with Juniper’s founding; until then, Cisco had ruled the router roost in both the enterprise and service provider markets since its founding in 1984.

But with the growing importance of the Internet, venture capitalists and unhappy Cisco customers sunk money into the idea of forming a start-up to build a better mousetrap, specifically for service providers. Juniper’s first year was nurtured with early investments from the Anschutz family (Qwest’s majority stakeholder), AT&T, Ericsson, Lucent, Nortel, Siemens/Newbridge Networks, 3Com and UUNET. IBM agreed to develop custom ASICs for Juniper’s Internet routers, the first of which was the M40.

With all the heavyweight backing, Juniper became and is still Cisco’s most formidable challenger in service provider routing. The company gradually attained a roughly 30% share of the $8 billion market, virtually all at Cisco’s expense, and has been the technological darling of some bitheads over the past decade for the purity – or purpose-built specialty – of its silicon and software.

This remains Juniper’s chief differentiator from Cisco. Cisco was viewed as a packager of enterprise-class products that were being deployed in more demanding service provider requirements. Cisco’s dominance and ubiquity in routing made many of its customers hungry for an alternative.

Cisco isn’t standing still. It’s been re-energized by the emergence of Juniper and the recent gains of Alcatel-Lucent in service provider edge routing. In 2009, Alcatel-Lucent leapfrogged Juniper’s nine-year hold on the No. 2 market share position in the service provider edge, according to Dell’Oro Group.

And Cisco still holds the lion’s share of the enterprise and service provider router market, with a customer base that’s mostly loyal to its incumbency. But it is Cisco and Juniper that try to leapfrog each other technologically in the service provider core and edge. Right now, the multi-chassis core race pits Cisco’s Carrier Routing System against Juniper’s T Series for tens – even hundreds — of terabits supremacy.

Juniper is taking the battle to enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments. Emboldened by its success in carrier routing, Juniper unveiled enterprise Ethernet switches two years ago in an attempt to become a credible alternative to Cisco’s dominance in that market, too. The company believes it can carve a niche in the elite networking arenas of financial trading, high-performance computing and other demanding enterprise environments just like it did in service provider routing.

In the data center, both companies are surrounding themselves with high-profile partners to help push their competing visions: Cisco with EMC and VMware, and Juniper with IBM. At stake, just as in service provider routing, is a multibillion dollar opportunity – $85 billion in private clouds by 2015, according to Cisco – to become the primary supplier of next-generation data centers, further entrench new and existing customers, and lock its rival out of lucrative, big ticket accounts.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/198147/cisco_vs_juniper.html

In 2009 Cisco announced its participation in the smart grid initiative, and one year later (May 25, 2010) Cisco has produced its first products to be used by utility companies in their smart grid networks. The new product offerings include the Cisco 2010 Connected Grid Router (CGR 2010) and the Cisco 2520 Connected Grid Switch (CGS 2520). The two new smart grid products from Cisco will enable utility companies to grab and analyze data from multiple intelligent electronic devices in a substation. The data can then be used to improve the monitoring and maintenance of power transmission and distribution systems, to find, diagnose and fix failures, and to more easily integrate renewable sources of power into the overall energy offerings. The two smart grid Cisco products are optimized to work in harsh environments (power stations) and include all major IOS features that are found in the other mainstream Cisco routers and switches.

Four demos, which encapsulate the innovation of Cisco will have the opportunity to watch the visitors of Cisco Expo 2010.

The great celebration of innovation will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday, April 20-21, 2010.

• The Cisco TelePresence, Cisco’s leading solution that offers the experience of face-to-face communications and removes their geographical constraints on cooperation, will be available to all visitors of the Cisco Expo. Two demo-rooms will be located in the exhibition space and communicate with each another in real-time.

• A commercial retail space, equipped with all modern technology that can make businesses more competitive, will be set up in the exhibition space. The Cisco Expo visitors will have the opportunity to experience wireless networking, unified communications and digital signage combined into one comprehensive solution for commercial stores of the future.

• The Cisco EnergyWise, innovative solution for the management of energy in buildings and offices, will be presented on stage at an impressive demo simulating the workplace. The presentation is scheduled on Wednesday, April 21, at 15: 00, presented by Antonis Tsimpoykis, Cisco Borderless Architecture Leader, Med Region, with the collaboration of other skilled people from Cisco, which would come to Athens ’ only for this purpose.

• Cisco Expo Athens will also establish a unique demo in Digital Media for telecommunications service providers, which will be available both days of the event.

The Athens Cisco Expo 2010 will be held on 20 and 21 April 2010 in “THEATRON” – Greek World Culture Center, pireos254, in Athens.

Participation is free for all professionals in the information technology and telecommunications sectors. For registrations, you can visit the homepage www.ciscoexpo.gr

OK, many of you might be wondering why I decided to change the domain name of a site which was embraced by so many professionals. Well, it has to do with trademark issues with Cisco. After reading a post from Jeremy Cioara at ciscoblog.com (read post here), he is forced by Cisco to close down his existing blog because the domain name includes the Trademarked name “Cisco” in it. Before receiving any letters from Cisco lawyers, I decided to move away from cisco-tips.com and get a more generic domain name. I Don’t want to face any legal issues with Cisco. Before calling me a coward, let me tell you that by violating Cisco’s Trademark policy, you are also violating their certification NDA agreement. I wouldn’t want to risk my certification status for a domain name right?

Well, the only thing that I promise you is that I will continue to update this new blog with fresh content related to IP Networking with focus on Cisco technologies. So keep visiting often !!

«We really believe that the IP (Internet Protocol) traffic on the Internet will be growing by 46% annually up to 2012 while the bulk of traffic, about 90%, will be consumed by video,” said Pankaj Patel, senior vice president who manages the company’s relationships with telecommunications carriers.

The ASR 9000 has innovative technology for proactive management of video signals which are particularly difficult. It can repair and offer an excellent image quality and performance for HDTV and other video services, state executives of Cisco. It is ideal for companies such as AT & T and Verizon because they offer more and faster Internet video to mobile phones and for the PC consumers.

As a corollary, the company adds that the ASR 9000 operates 40% more effectively than other competing products, helping to save the planet and saving money for the network operators.

So far, some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, including Softbank Corp. Japan have signed for the acquisition of such devices. The ASR 9000 router is using the same operating system as the Cisco CRS – 1 that transmits data with rate of 92 trillion bits per second and which now ‘runs’ for more than 200 telecommunication operators in the high speed lanes of the world wide web. When the Cisco launched CRS-1 in 2004, some analysts said that these heavy duty network machines (weighing 2,300 pounds and having a height of 7 feet) did not satisfied customers’ wishes. They even predicted that the San Jose company will not sell more than 50 units. Pankaj however stated that Cisco now sells at least 50 such routers per week. Last year, the company earned 39 billion U.S. dollars just from the sales of ASR routers.

Glen Hunt, an analyst at Current Analysis said that Cisco’s new router will cost providers at least $ 80,000. The ASR 9000 can be installed close to homes and business premises of consumers. This model took 4 years to get out to production and had cost $200 million U.S. dollars. According to Ray Mota, director of sales strategy of Synergy Research Group, the ASR 9000 will fill a gap in the production chain of Cisco and will help the San Jose company to maintain its market share. Cisco competes with companies like Alcatel – Lucent and Juniper Networks in the sales of routers. However, Cisco controls 59% of the market compared with Alcatel – Lucent controlling 15% and 14% for Juniper.

The DHCP server must have an appropriate IP Pool scope configured for the specific subnet from where the DHCP request came. Using this IP scope, the server will assign an appropriate IP address to the requesting client. For example, if the DHCP client subnet is 192.168.1.0/24, then the remote DHCP server must have an IP Pool configured to assign addresses within the range 192.168.1.0/24. The source DHCP client subnet is determined by the IP address assigned to the Layer3 interface which has the ip helper-address configured.

Let’s see an example scenario below with a configuration snapshot.

From the network diagram above, two DHCP client PCs are located behind Router A. Interface Fe0/0 of the router has IP address 192.168.1.1/24. The DHCP clients will start broadcasting DHCP requests in order to get their IP address information assigned from a server. By default, these DHCP broadcast requests will be confined within Switch A and will never reach any other subnet beyond Router A. By configuring an “ip helper-address 10.10.10.1” under interface Fe0/0 of Router A, we tell the router to turn the DHCP broadcast into a DHCP unicast and send it to destination DHCP server 10.10.10.1. The server will see that the DHCP request came from source subnet 192.168.1.0/24 and will therefore assign an appropriate IP address from a configured IP pool scope within the range 192.168.1.0.

Configuration on Router A

RouterA# conf t
RouterA(config)# interface fastethernet0/0
RouterA(config-if)# ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0
RouterA(config-if)# ip helper-address 10.10.10.1

Some other important considerations for ip helper-address

By default, the ip helper-address command forwards also some other broadcast protocols in addition to the DHCP (BOOTP) protocol. It forwards by default the following eight UDP broadcast protocols:

• UDP 37 (Time protocol)
• UDP 49 (TACACS)
• UDP 53 (DNS)
• UDP 67 (DHCP Server)
• UDP 68 (DHCP Client)
• UDP 69 (TFTP)
• UDP 137 (NetBios)
• UDP 138 (NetBios Datagram service)

If you want to add more broadcast protocols to be forwarded, or even remove some of the default forwarded protocols, you can use the “ip forward-protocol” command under global config mode.

Example: Remove the NetBios protocols (137,138) from being forwarded by default, and add NTP protocol 123 to be forwarded by ip helper-address.

RouterA(config)# no ip forward-protocol udp 137
RouterA(config)# no ip forward-protocol udp 138
RouterA(config)# ip forward-protocol udp 123

Legacy security architectures were designed with just perimeter and network security in mind. In the past, security experts were thinking that by installing a network firewall and maybe an Intrusion Detection System would provide all the required security. This is not true at all for protecting against modern attacks. Indeed a high-speed dedicated hardware firewall is still needed to provide low-level inspection and filtering (catching various attacks on the network and transport layers). After the legacy security infrastructure devices do their job (allowing only clean traffic to pass to the applications), an application firewall is also required for deeper inspection of incoming data and for discovering more complex application attacks that a regular firewall is not able to detect.

The ACE Web Application Firewall is a security appliance that is intended for deployment inside the DMZ segment, where your Web Applications are located. It fulfills all the requirements for companies that want to comply with PCI DSS regulations (companies that store and process credit card data) and combines deep Web application analysis with high-performance Extensible Markup Language (XML) inspection and management to address the full range of these threats. It secures and protects Web applications from common attacks such as identity theft, data theft, application disruption, fraud, SQL injection attacks, XSS attacks etc.

For more information of the ACE Web Application Firewall visit the Cisco link HERE.

As with any version upgrade, there are many new features on this release, most of them you will never use them in your life!! This is a characteristic of IOS anyway. It includes all features under the sun related with networking. It offers much flexibility, but also a lot of unnecessary stuff that you will never user them.

Before upgrading to version 15, I strongly recommend to use the Cisco Feature Navigator tool from cisco.com site in order to verify memory requirements (most important) and also to identify which features are supported.

Here are the release notes for IOS 15.0M and HERE is the main page for this release.