All projects posts in Cisco Community

Re: cisco sample GUI program

balaji.bandi — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:56:09 GMT

Nice how can we test PHP or EXE download locally ?

cisco sample GUI program

mohammedalazawy1981253 — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 16:09:35 GMT

this is my cisco Gui program it can use for 2xxx,3xxx,4xxx switches
in 2 types :exe,servire php
i waiting your opinian

Virtual Pods created using Packet Tracer - Education Environment

ujith.hettiarachchi — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 03:03:21 GMT

This idea really came through while we were planning remote delivery of learning to our students during last year's crisis. We usually have face-to-face classes which were cancelled during that time.

I have created some 'virtual' pods using Packet Tracer software, that will assist students to practice some of Lab Activities, in case they do not have access to real equipment.

These are really PKA (i.e. PT Activity files), with 'logical' tab and some of the features disabled, just like in a normal lab situation. When a student opens this file, they will get the 'physical' tab and within that they will get access to a rack with routers, switches and PCs as required for a lab. Students can connect to a networking device only through the Terminal screen by connecting a console cable.

Have a look through and give some feedback. If CCNA Curriculum Designers could provide similar files to practice labs, that will be helpful for most of the students to understand networking equipment in a more appropriate manner.

Cisco firewall migration

Amit Gumber — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 18:33:33 GMT

This is the project about migration or we can say complete replacement from ASA 5515 to Cisco Secure Firewall 5516 with TAMC license in one of the remote location. As in earlier firewall which don't have any protection license and deployed as stateful inspection which cause threads and malware from internet into the network on very frequent basis. So we decided to go with upper model with protection license.

During migration we face challenge in exporting security policies as old box was running in older version but after

putting efforts we were able to manage and migration happened successfully.

Apart from Cisco 5516 firewall we are using Juniper EX 4200 switches in our internal network which we are also planning to roll out with new Cisco model switches.

Re: Cisco CUCM and WebEx Installation for School District Staff

jesse7Tzz — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 16:15:36 GMT

Gallifrean, yep, I think that more and more organizations should have such systems. Talking about that, if you're trying to develop high-performing employees, by planning and executing targeted training programs, you should also pay attention to this resource ( link: https://www.lanteria.com/solutions/lanteria-hr/learning ), which I found few weeks ago, and I can highly recommend it, cause it helped me a lot in my work goals.

Teamwork - Network Installation

mark.mcsherry — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 23:45:05 GMT

Teamwork - Network Installation

I've been wanting to write a blog for a little while now on the subject of teamwork.

This, of course, is against the backdrop of what we do as a company - network design and commission.

For many outsiders, it's a surprise to see that there's actually a fair bit of manual work in network deployment, and there in lies the great opportunity to work and come together as a team.

As a team, we deployed to site across a number of weeks to undertake the installation. In this blog, I am going to take a bit of a departure from the normal technical blogs I write and walk you through the onsite physical aspect of network installation, and how effective teamwork makes all the difference.

It's not often written about, so here's your chance to see how a team works to deliver a large, complex installation - under tight time pressure.

Have a read of the sister blog to this one, which takes a look at human factors in network installation.

Pre-Site Network Design

At the time any team arrives onsite, weeks have already been spent in developing detailed designs, specifying and ordering up bills of materials and generally project planning to arrive onsite.

Turning up onsite with a plan is paramount. What that plan looks like is different for different sites and different technologies. There's a few things that you know will happen.

A lot of equipment will arrive - you need to store that somewhere. You will have to dispose of a LOT of cardboard.. it's got to go somewhere. There will be inductions and other processes to get right. There's a lot to think about - and prepare for.

Let's take a run through on some of the key items.

Equipment Arrival

Equipment is going to arrive. You best think about the detailed specifics for this one. A truck is going to roll up at some point with a lot of heavy equipment on the back.

You might need a forklift to get it off - and does anyone have the forklift ticket to do that (let alone an actual forklift). This simple question to ask will save an awful lot of time.

The next thing to think about, is that you need a manifest of what you expect to arrive - and an electronic way to receipt it.

That takes some preparation, but with 100's or 1000's of constituent part codes, it's not to be underestimated.

For us, the equipment arrived just after dusk. The driver had driven a long way and the time was estimated, but came in pretty much as we expected.

With a bunch of us to unload - and with grateful reception, a forklift - getting the equipment from the truck worked well. Successful teamwork is a measure of the outputs - all the kit safely unloaded, all accounted for and stored away is a good result from this phase.

Unboxing Equipment

While this sounds simple, we spent two WHOLE days of time unboxing JUST THE ACCESS POINTS.

This is a repetitive, borrowing task. Eco packaging for the APs we ordered wasn't available - but ALWAYS try and buy with eco packaging.

It cuts down an awful lot of time, and to be frank, is way better for the environment.

It took an age just to lug all that cardboard out the door to the skip.

I can say that it's also pretty hard work! Get a good bench setup and take the back strain out of it!

There's a process here that should be followed too.

The kit gets unboxed, all the screws, mounting brackets and so on kept to one side and the cardboard disposed of.

Each asset gets a name and the appropriate brackets attached. A small production line speeds up the process.

Although it's obvious, working in teams on the boring tasks is so much easier, as well as regular breaks. A coffee just at the right moment makes all the difference. Ask any IT person

If you're interested in some other blogs, check out https://blog.iptel.com.au

Re: Bridge distance between students during the pandemic

ahmad_tamneh — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 20:39:17 GMT

thankd for your nice comment

Re: The Importance of the Human Factor in Network Deployment

Arne Bier — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 10:01:12 GMT

the site didn’t go fabric after DNAC arrived. We had hand crafted the VRFs to fuse in the FTD. Perhaps one day the customer will move to fabric. There was also no TrustSec in this design. A fabric deployment would have probably sped deployment up a bit.

Re: Bridge distance between students during the pandemic

Kathy N. — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 14:56:55 GMT

Great to hear other success stories for providing students and teachers with ways to continue education around the world. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Bridge distance between students during the pandemic

Gallifrean — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 05:44:53 GMT

Good job JBS and Cisco

stepping up during pandemic

Re: Cisco CUCM and WebEx Installation for School District Staff

Gallifrean — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 23:41:58 GMT

I wish our contact tracing team had some of these great Cisco products

like cucm

Re: Bridge distance between students during the pandemic

mkhriesa — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 15:22:07 GMT

GOOD job! what a great efforts during COVID19!

and yes JBS always here to support everyone ,,, anywhere,,,, anytime.

Re: Bridge distance between students during the pandemic

mohammad_tulaib — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 08:41:04 GMT

Great job ... This is the new definition of humanity

Re: Bridge distance between students during the pandemic

pmckenzie — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 07:01:33 GMT

Great job to assist 7000 students on the Webex platform

We are also using Webex to connect our students, luckily we had already set it up some years ago for access to remote campuses so it was relatively easy to extend.

Bridge distance between students during the pandemic

ahmad_tamneh — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 09:33:18 GMT

More than 7000+ students have benefited from using the CISCO Webex platform.

I as JBS (Jordan Business Systems) In partnership with Cisco implemented an integrated plan for distance education through Cisco Webex as an e-learning platform for The Islamic Center Charity Society and its 41 different schools and colleges spread across Jordan.

The educational sector of the association has adopted the e-learning platform in co-operation with JBS, which partners with Cisco International. The online platform allows teachers to collaborate with students interactively covering all topics for all levels of study.

I did the implementation from scratch as part of our social responsibility, to help Jordanian schools and children access their right to a good education no matter what the situation with the pandemic across the country.

I myself and my collaboration team helped in the training process for school teachers as well as management teams, where we attended many lectures with the children to watch how they adopt the technology - and to provide useful support.

The General Director of the Education Sector at the Association, Dr. Fathi, pointed out the platform achieved positive results in a questionnaire authored by the co-operating technical company, with 83.8% of parents of students expressing satisfaction.

A big success - using the CISCO platform, many young people have been reached in schools across Jordan.

He also pointed out that the platform has sustained more than 50 thousand participants through nearly 4700 educational meetings across the platform. More than 7000 students in the educational sector of the association, from colleges and schools, have benefited using the platform so far.

I believe that JBS and Cisco insisted on creating this initiative in line with their social responsibilities. It was also about a shared belief in the right to education for all, in basic human rights, and to support official government procedures aimed at serving Jordan’s students and children under difficult and exceptional circumstances.

Re: The Importance of the Human Factor in Network Deployment

YanBedia49446 — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 10:51:46 GMT

Great Job!

Re: The Importance of the Human Factor in Network Deployment

pmckenzie — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:27:21 GMT

Great example of Agile project and making do with what was at hand. Automation saves the day and time spend configuring.

Re: From Stateful Firewalling to Next Generation Firewall

mateens — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 09:26:28 GMT

I am also have issues with establishing dynamic IPsec tunnels with FTD. It is not working with more than one tunnel at a time. site to site vpn with dynamic endpoint.

Re: The Importance of the Human Factor in Network Deployment

Arshadsaf — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 23:01:13 GMT

Hi Arne, It is wonderful to hear that you successfully completed the project. Just wondering once the DNA Center arrived, did u change this site to a full Fabric deployment or onboarded the existing equipment in non fabric mode?

Re: Cisco CUCM and WebEx Installation for School District Staff

dduerkse — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 03:01:36 GMT

Kathy, you and your team did a wonderful job in the project definition, RFP process, vendor selection, rollout plan and training. I was part of the original Cisco team early on in the project. It was very enjoyable working with the district. Glad things worked out so well.

Re: From Stateful Firewalling to Next Generation Firewall

ShashankBangari38827 — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 13:42:18 GMT

Very well explained and will surely be of great help where ASAs as being migrated to FTDs. Thank you for sharing your experience.

Cisco CUCM and WebEx Installation for School District Staff

Kathy N. — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 13:58:56 GMT

Funding was approved in the Fall of 2018 for District 11 to replace an Avaya phone system that was end of life and support in 2019. The District request included requirements for mobile phone clients and video conferencing services. Our goal was to not only replace an outdated phone system but to provide state of the art services for staff that would let them be more mobile and have access to more current technology.

The Cisco Unified Communication Manager was proposed for the telephone services which included Jabber to provide our staff with a mobile client they can use on a computer, tablets and mobile phones. Installation of CUCM completed in December, 2019 and included a site by site training the day after each cut. While many staff didn’t initially embrace Jabber and preferred to use their desk phone, Jabber has become an integral tool for them since March 13, 2020. Currently we average about one fourth of our staff logged in using Jabber on a daily basis. District administrative staff use it to work from home in order to continue to respond to calls from parents, students, other staff and outside contacts.

Teacher’s were especially thankful to have this available to them. It allows them to keep their personal contact information private but still interact with students and parents. It also let them control when they were available to take calls and set specific “office” hours.

Webex has become the official conference and meeting tool for the District. We completed our last official training on March 12, 2020. The day before the District decided to close for a 2 week unscheduled Spring Break in order to prepare for Remote Learning. During the 2 week break, we prepared additional resource documentation and videos for staff and parents which were posted on a dedicated Distance Learning website. We used many of the Cisco Education resources and also created resources that provided District specific information.

Since we are a K12 school district with about 50 locations, we were only able to work in the schools over the summer and after school. We were able to complete about 1/2 of our installs during the Summer of 2019 and completed the remaining with about 4 locations per week through December, 2019. Our biggest challenge was training staff on the new system. We have one technology support person at each building that we provided training for and then they were responsible for working with us to train the remaining staff. With at least 50 people at each site, only 3 trainers and no specific training classes, it was a challenge to educate staff on all the features.

We were able to provide Webex classes during the Spring of 2020 but attendance was slim. Coincidentally the last class was held on Thursday, March 12, and the District announced they were closing at the end of the day on Friday, March 13. In order to help staff, we scheduled additional Webex classes for the first week of April. I also announced that staff could contact me anytime and I could join an ongoing meeting or class to help with any issues or questions. Several of the technology support contacts at the schools also scheduled a training session with their staff. I would review the Webex application for about 30 minutes and then open it up for Q&A. During the Q&A I would not only answer questions but also give the attendees the opportunities to use the Share feature, make them Host so they could view their options and navigate any other features they were interested in. We would also briefly discuss how to manage attendees using the Mute All options, raising hands and expelling participants.

Our next step is to provide Hands-on Labs for teachers. This was not originally provisioned for us so we are working with Cisco TAC to enable the features so our desktop support team can begin installing the Webex Access Anywhere app on District computers. Teachers are excited for this application so students can access District purchased applications in our computer labs during scheduled class time as well as work on projects independently at their leisure.

From Stateful Firewalling to Next Generation Firewall

Narayan Dev Sarma — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 14:02:20 GMT

A customer of ours was running Cisco ASA firewalls (HA) for more than 10 years which was mainly handling their corporate segment traffic. Over the time these boxes faced end of life and end of support, what made the customer go for the next generation firewalls as replacement option. As a replacement process they procured Cisco Firepower Threat Defense boxes.

As we started planning for the migration we found few challenges listed below -

Routing from static, EIRGP to BGP.
GRE/IPSEC traffic that would traverse the FTD.
Time based ACL – Not resolved as the current version 6.4.0.9 running on this boxes don’t support this feature. Waiting for a stable version of 6.6 or above.
S2S VPN etc.

Used Firepower migration tool to migrate the configuration from ASA to FTD which is quite helpful to build up the migration process with all the unsupported configurations listed in the pre and post migration reports.

We had to face failure during the initial migration window and reschedule the migration. GRE/IPSec traffic found out the main culprit for failing the tunnels pairing. We took support from Cisco TAC and the engineers were quite supportive and further we did our homework too by reproducing the issue at our office lab. The GRE/IPSec traffic are subjected to get inspected by the Snort in FTD and the verdict for these types of traffic is dropped.

In our rescheduled migration window we exactly knew what needs to be done but still faced the same issue with the GRE/IPsec traffic getting dropped by Snort. Eventually, after 30mins we were able to fix it by fine tuning the pre-filter policy and allowing the GRE and ESP with action as fastpath and “clear conn” was a great help to bounce the tunnels and traffic to take the correct rules.

The allocated migration window time was 4 hours but we managed to finish the activity within 3 hours. After that came the big challenge with all the application owners going to check their applications and we just put our finger crossed as we didn’t want a roll back. Almost all applications worked fine, but few issues were reported like remote branches VIOP calls weren’t going through and also swift application reported an issue. All these issues were related to routing and was taking care. Some other issues were reported related to RAVPN anyconnect with ISE posturing and windows login slowness which were related to NAT and access rules on FTD and were also taken care. Constantly, worked for almost 26 long hours to provide a better experience to the client for their next business working day.

Now with the successful migration and handed over the boxes to their operation team, we provided a KT session where we pointed few things out.

This NGFW comes loaded with advanced features like Security intelligence, URL blacklist and Whitelist, DNS blacklist and Whitelist, Intrusion prevention system and some more features.
These features are connected to Talos and snort cloud to provide proactive resolution for network security related threats.
So they need understand the power and capability of it and use it in proper and efficient way.

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

The Importance of the Human Factor in Network Deployment

Arne Bier — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 14:01:30 GMT

I work for a Cisco Partner who employs around 15 engineers, predominantly designing and optimizing Wireless networks.

We were awarded an amazing opportunity in the first quarter of 2020: designing and implementing the wired and wireless network for a hospital destined as a COVID recovery facility. And best of all: have it operational in 6 weeks. The pressure was on.

Network Design Phase

Together with Cisco we put together an ambitious design that would provide switching and Wi-Fi across 9 floors, with 210 access points around the facility. While our wireless design team was creating access point predictive designs, we simultaneously crafted detailed designs for the Cisco 9800 WLC, Cat 9K LAN, DNAC, ASA, ISE, UCS Compute and Unified Comms.

All of these Cisco products were SDA ready, and the intent was to design and deploy the solution with DNAC.

The requirements included placing various data flows in their own VRFs and micro-segmentation within the VRFs. That’s what SDA was built for. My role was to design and deploy Cisco ISE, DNAC and UCS. The documentation gathering requirements, designing, and testing was essential and that alone could have consumed 6 weeks!

Rapid Deployment needs an Agile Approach

We adopted an agile approach once the designs were ready to allow us to start deployment, given the tight deadlines. The lead times and delivery complications during the pandemic started to present us with some challenges.

We desperately needed Cat 9500 switches to build the switching core but we knew the kit would not arrive in time. Thanks to our great relationship with the local Cisco team we got loan equipment to allow us to immediately construct the Core and access layer. The next challenge was that the delivery times of the DNAC were too close to the go live date.

This was a pivotal moment for us, since DNAC would have hidden all the complexity of the VRFs and micro-segmentation, to allow the customer to operate the network with relative ease. In the short time frames, we used our DevOps team to automate the creation of the IOS-XE commands for the various access layer switches, which reduced time and errors. It was an iterative process and the automation proved invaluable.

The VRF design was done by hand, and micro-segmentation was postponed to a future project. It would have been possible to but at the expense of handing over a network that the operators had no time to learn or prepare for.

First Online: LAN Comes Alive

The LAN was up and running very quickly and the customer was connecting the end devices as quickly as time permitted.

The LAN is always a fundamental component of any network installation, making sense this component goes first.

The image on the left shows the initial switch installation, prior to cabling up. Each level of installation requires a certain amount of OCD to ensure its installed neatly and in the right order.

As the network builds, it’s a great feeling to add the higher level layers. The next stage is patching out the network.

Using a colour coded patching scheme for easier identification at the access layer. We needed to test nurse call, security systems, telephony integration – to list but a few services.Figure 1 - A typical floor comms rack for the access layer – Cisco Stacks – Colour coded by device role

Next Step: UCS Servers

My UCS servers had not arrived yet due to COVID related delays and we had to improvise yet again.

Luckily we had a Cisco BE7000 Unified Comms server on site and we appropriated some of its resources to host the services we needed to run, including the Cisco Firepower Management Console, various Windows servers, security and essential nurse call components. Doing this is not officially supported but it was a life saver to allow integrators to test their services. The UCSs arrived in time for me to migrate the VMs from our surrogate BE7000 server to a vCenter managed cluster.

Towards the end, our beefy DNAC appliance arrived which slotted in nicely as our assurance platform for the entire solution.

One massive time saver with DNA Center was the Ekahau integration. Our wireless architects provided me with the Ekahau project file that contained all the precise AP placements, down to the centimetre accuracy for Hyper-Location. It would have taken a week to place all those APs by hand, but with DNAC it was a matter of seconds.Figure 2 - One of many comms racks containing every imaginable Cisco product

Project Outcomes

We completed the project on time and the outcome was successful.

The success was not only due to extreme hard work by our onsite teams, but also to vendor partnership and human ingenuity when things don’t go according to your best intentions.

The long term goal for this customer is to fully modernise their various hospital ICT networks using SDA, but this requires planning and approaching this new SDN world in smaller steps.

This COVID facility still contains sufficient new technology that the customer will embrace over time, since the operations team needs to make the leap from AireOS WLC to C9800, and from Prime to DNAC.

On the plus side, it’s a gentle introduction to the building blocks of SDA.

Changing the face of the modern Datacentre

james@bestpath.io — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 14:00:30 GMT

As a growing Cisco partner, we are always striving for ways to help our customers achieve the best from their Cisco solutions and this particular case study is no different. This journey explores the modernisation of a customer’s datacentre from a traditional IOS/NXOS 3 tier architecture, consisting of many protocols and connectivity types to a large-scale Software Defined Networking solution.

As with all of our projects we packed our laptops and arrived at the client’s site ready to start identifying the customers’ requirements and the existing topology. This helps us understand what technology to position to meet the client’s expectations. It was quickly evident that that a modern Software Defined Datacentre was required to meet the demands of the business and create a platform to build upon. The customer wanted a solution that provided agility to scale anywhere, speed up the time to deliver new solutions and at the same time, remove some of the constraints seen with traditional dependencies. For example, End-of-Life platforms and historical Layer-2 extensions between various locations.

For this project, Cisco ACI Multi-Site was positioned. Based on Cisco Cloud Scale technology, the Nexus 9000 platform was positioned as the underlying hardware. By choosing this platform, the customer was able to adopt a high bandwidth, equidistant network architecture. Paired with the industry leading VXLAN and API capabilities, Cisco ACI Multi-Site provided the customer with the ability to re-platform their infrastructure using a uniform hierarchical policy model from multiple physical locations within their network estate.

Once the solution was positioned and the build of the solution complete in multiple datacentres, the next step in the journey required us to audit and migrate away from the existing EoL infrastructure to Cisco ACI. This stage of the project was made easier with the ability to quickly translate the existing configurations into structured data ready to be pushed to the fabrics through tried and tested automation tooling.

Once completed, the network benefits included an increase of the average available bandwidth within the datacentres by over 1000%, the average end-to-end payload increased by 500% and the end-to-end latency and errors between servers being dramatically reduced. As a result of the project, the customer was able to realise the true business benefits of cost savings and risk mitigations seen by the consolidation and removal of End-of-Life platforms.

Since the initial project completed successfully, BestPath continues to work with the expanding Cisco datacentre portfolio, including Cisco ACI Multi-Pod, Remote Leaf, Public Cloud integrations and Cisco Hyperflex.