One of my readers asked a very interesting question:

“Is there a way to have a port on a router open for legitimate use while closed to port scanning software and the such. For example. I have SSL VPN configured on my IOS router. Is it possible to have the port seem stealthed to port scanners while still allowing legitimate access to the service? An example being, allowing a web browser to connect using the port but making sure that a port scanner doesn't detect it as open.”

The short answer is no, unless you can differentiate legitimate users by their IP addresses. The port scanners (when using SYN scan) simply open and close a TCP session, and there is no way for a router to differentiate between the legitimate users (who would send valid HTTP GET requests) and port scanners (that would close the session as soon as it's established).

When IOS started supporting dynamic allocation of IPCP (IP over PPP) addresses, it also got the mechanism to insert a dynamic host route toward the neighbor's IP address once the IP addresses were negotiated. This mechanism makes perfect sense in dynamic address allocation environments, as the subnet mask is not negotiated with IPCP. Without a host route toward the other end of the PPP link, there would be no easy way to reach the IP prefixes reachable via the PPP link.

Sometimes it would be nice to have the full complement of Unix utilities available on Cisco IOS. That's not going to happen for a while, but we can use Tcl to make our life simpler in the meantime. Xavier Brouckaert, a regular contributor to my blog, has sent me the Tcl implementation of line counting utility (equivalent to wc -l on Unix).

First you have to define the wc Tcl procedure:

When trying to extract the OSPF route selection rules from RFC 2328, I've stumbled across a very weird rule (section 16.4.1): if an ASBR within a non-backbone area advertises an external route (or if the forwarding address is within the non-backbone area), it's preferred over external routes advertised by ASBRs in other areas regardless of its metric. I simply had to test this on Cisco IOS … and found out that Cisco engineers prefer common sense to OSPF RFC.

Any serious (or at least security-aware) ISP should not blindly accept BGP routes from its customers but at the very minimum do some sanity checks on them. For example, if a multi-homed customer is clumsy enough to advertise BGP routes between service providers, it’s nice if you still stop him from turning into a transit AS. The required filter is conceptually quite simple: all the BGP routes from the customer should contain only his AS number in the AS-path.

The initial non-scalable approach is obvious: accept only the AS paths that have exactly the customer’s AS number in the AS path. For example, if your customer’s AS number is 65001, you could use this filter: ip as-path access-list 100 permit ^65001$.

When we’ve been assigning router interfaces in OSPF areas with the network router configuration command, it was impossible to start OSPF only on some unnumbered interfaces and not on others (or place the unnumbered interfaces in different areas). These restrictions are removed if you use the ip ospf area interface configuration command.

Every now and then, EEM applets fail to recognize a new configuration prompt generated by the router and abort due to timeout (or hang-up forever if you're using IOS release prior to 12.4(15)T). You can use the new pattern keyword of the action cli configuration command to fix the bug.

Enterprise networks primarily use BGP with their Internet Service Providers if they want to be multi-homed (connected to more than one ISP). A very common requirement in a multi-homed design is the primary/backup setup where the lower speed (or sometimes lower quality) link should only be used when the primary link fails.

Competent ISPs help their customers reach this goal by using BGP local preference within their network and giving the customers the ability to indicate the desired value of BGP local preference through BGP communities: if the route received directly from the customer has low local preference, all other routes are preferred, resulting in the desired traffic flow that avoids the backup link if at all possible as shown in the next diagram:

Mohammad Faraz Rehan has encountered an interesting problem when using IP access-list based class/policy maps on Catalyst 3750:

When I try to apply the same service-policy to more than 15 interfaces, the configuration command fails and the switch generates the following syslog message:

%QOSMGR-4-POLICER_PLATFORM_NOT_SUPPORTED: Policer configuration has exceeded hardware limitation for policymap …

I've tried to help him with various TCAM-related information and in the end he found an interesting solution to the problem:

It looks like there is a limit related to using the same access-list/class-map/policy-map on multiple interfaces.

The first time I was applying the same policy-map (19 classes/19 ACLs/46 ACL lines) on all interfaces, but the switch would not accept it on more than 15 interfaces. Another test scenario had 18 classes/18 ACLs/52 ACL entries and the same policy-map would only work on 13 interfaces.

Now we implemented 24 different policy-maps, class-maps and ACLs remained the same, and the switch is happy.

If you use LDP-based MPLS as the only means of transporting data across your network core (for example, in MPLS VPN networks or in BGP-free ISP core), a router startup might disrupt your Label Switched Paths (remember: they are always based on IGP best paths) leading to a temporary disruption in service.

For example, when the router P1 in the network shown in the following diagram is powered on, and its IGP advertises its presence, the IGP-derived path from PE1 to PE2 will go over P1. If the LDP on P1 has not exchanged labels with PE1 and PE2, there will be no LSP on the shortest path between PE1 and PE2, resulting in a loss of traffic until the labels are exchanged and LSP is built.