Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

I figured I should get this written while I can, and before it all fades away from my brain … here’s my thoughts on Cisco Live and some advice for future first-time attendees.

So we powered on our first to arrive Nexus 7706s (two of them). Here’s some notes so far.

An attempt to communicate an issue (and the solution) I ran into with Perl’s Net::SNMP function “get_table”, that would result in a “The message size exceeded the buffer maxMsgSize of 1452” error. It took a couple of packet captures and Googling to figure out why this problem was occurring and implement a fix.

A fellow engineer attempting to debug a jumbo frames issue was seeing what should have been a bunch of fragmented frames as a single 13,000 byte frame. Once he figured out why, I was told to fix it. Here’s my solution.

I finally got the job I’ve been wanting for, oh, nearly a decade now (if not more). In this job I’m the go-to admin for the servers (almost all CentOS based) that support a large (3000+ device) network. Cisco routers run the network, and we have servers that are connected to “monitor” ports. One of the principle tasks of these servers are to allow network engineers to run packet captures. Thing is, interesting things can happen as far as IPv6 is concerned when you have systems getting IPv6 router advertisements on server interfaces that don’t actually do more than just accept packets …