Using FreeRADIUS with Cisco Devices

Even though I am the only administrator for the devices in my lab and home network, I thought it would be nice to have some form of centralized authentication, authorization and accounting for these devices. However, I quickly realized that using a dedicated appliance such as Cisco ACS or ISE would mean adding another always-on VM to my lab environment. I wasn’t quite ready to start wasting my lab resources on a basic function like AAA. So instead of using a dedicated appliance, I decide to implement FreeRADIUS on the Ubuntu Linux server that I use for DNS, DHCP, syslog, and other network services in my lab.

Although, TACACS+ is usually the protocol of choice for Cisco AAA, my requirements are simple enough that RADIUS will work just as well. And since FreeRADIUS is included in the standard Ubuntu repositories this should be very easy to install. Continue reading

OTV and LISP on the CSR 1000v

OTV and LISP are two interesting new data center technologies that are worth examining when you are studying for a Cisco Data Center certification, such as CCNP or CCIE Data Center. Unfortunately, not everybody can afford a couple of Nexus 7000s to play with. As an instructor for Fast Lane I regularly have access to Nexus based labs, but I still thought that it would be nice to have a lab setup of my own to experiment with. Fortunately, there is now a very nice way to get some hands-on experience with these protocols through the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v, which I blogged about earlier.

The CSR 1000v is based on the same IOS XE code that runs on the ASR 1000, which supports both OTV and LISP. So I decided to try to build a lab to test VM mobility using OTV and LISP in my home lab using a number of CSR 1000v instances. Continue reading