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There is another often requested feature now in the code base. The “pipe”.

Strangely it isn’t documented, but you have the standard begin/include/exclude set of options.

Usage:

show run | begin vlan

So here’s one for you…as of the K.13.X release of code, you now can use DHCP options 66 and 67 to specify a TFTP server and filename for configuration at boot. The switch listens by default for these options. Combine that with the “auto-tftp” command, and voila!…You have a switch that is configured and standardized [...]

So I was at a client site this week troubleshooting a strange traffic mirroring issue. It went something like this:
I thought the ProCurve 3500 mirror port was dropping specific inbound oversized SIP packets on the outbound mirror port. The actual traffic went through, but the mirror port only saw the continuation frame, not the initial 1500 [...]

When working with ProCurve products and SNMP, we do a lot with ifIndex, standardized in the RFC 2863 IF-MIB. Of course, the physical/logical correlation of the ProCurve interfaces with the MIB ifindex entries don’t line up, ie, port A1=ifindex 1, but port B1=ifindex 25. Also, VLAN’s and loopbacks get their own entries, and those aren’t [...]

Pretty much everyone knows that reserved multicast addresses are always flooded on ethernet networks. IGMP does not program filters for packets addressed to the “Reserved Multicast Address” range. There are Reserved Addresses at Layer 3 (i.e., 224.0.0.1 – 224.0.0.255) that at layer two are indistinguishable from a broader range of MAC Addresses (because the Multicast [...]

I’ve had a lot of partners and customers lately asking me for a Cisco interop document from ProCurve. These aren’t officially sanctioned, but should do the trick.

Here is the link to a zip file containing the following:

Cisco interop powerpoint: This was put together by one of the European technical consultants, and discusses things like migration [...]

ProCurve has released a plethora of new product and features…here are the updated MIB’s for all you SNMP guru’s.

I attended the HPTF back in June, and didn’t get a chance to write about my favorite part of the week. Packet/protocol analysis is the last word for troubleshooting problems in our world. I use Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) every week. There is so much to know about the software, it’s use, and analysis features. No [...]

Check this out. It’s a Perl script (hence cross platform) that not just pulls configs, but also archives and has the option to only pull them if they’ve changed. Check out the options:

repository
The base directory for saving the configuration files.

keep
The maximum number of config files to retain for the device. When this limit is reached, [...]