Posts for: #IP

Operating Sonos Speakers in a Multi-VLAN Network

Operating Sonos Speakers in a Multi-VLAN Network

In a throwback to the problems I dealt with using AirPlay across VLANs, I recently jumped through similar hoops for Sonos speakers. There are many forum and blog posts out there that describe (or attempt to describe) how to make this work, however all of the ones I read suffered from one or both of these problems:

  1. Their instructions had errors (eg, reversing the upstream and downstream interfaces when talking about multicast).
  2. They don't have a diagram of traffic flow! Every network engineer knows that a diagram is a must when trying to understand how two systems are talking to each other.

This post will dive deep on what's happening on the wire when a Sonos controller (eg, your mobile phone running the Sonos app) tries to talk with the players (the speakers) on the network. The focus will be how to make this process work when those two devices are in different VLANs.

What you read below works successfully with Sonos Beam, Sonos Sub, and Sonos Move using the Sonos S1 app.

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AWS VPC Traffic Mirroring Walkthrough

AWS VPC Traffic Mirroring Walkthrough
I was recently playing around with the Traffic Mirroring feature in AWS. As a network geek, this is right up my alley because as some colleagues and I used to say, "the wire never lies!". Being able to pick packets off the wire for detailed inspection has saved the day many a time. Until Traffic Mirroring came along, it wasn't possible to do that in an Amazon VPC. Below are my notes and considerations for using this feature.
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AWS ABCs -- Network Building Blocks

AWS ABCs -- Network Building Blocks

Given that my technical background is largely in the networking space (exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C (CIE)), one of the first things I tried to wrap my head around when being introduced to AWS is how networking works in the AWS cloud.

What I attempted to do was build a mental model by relating cloud networking constructs such as Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), subnets, and routing tables to on-prem, physical networking constructs. This worked pretty well but I did get tripped up at times because some of these constructs don't map exactly one-for-one.

This post will explain the mental model I used while also calling attention to the elements or behaviors that don't map exactly between on-prem and AWS.

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Label Switched Multicast -- Ethernet Header

I got an interesting email from Ying Lu who had read my posts on LSM: I am curious about the Ethernet DA and codepoint used for multicast MPLS. Previously, I understand that: Ethernet DA is unicast MAC of nexthop of each replication leg. codepoint is 0x8847 However, looking at RFC5332, I am not so sure... Quote: "Ethernet is an example of a multipoint-to-multipoint data link. Ethertype 0x8847 is used whenever a unicast ethernet frame carries an MPLS packet.
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Label Switched Multicast -- Q&A

This post is the last one I'm planning in this series on Label Switched Multicast (LSM). The questions & answers below are meant to expand on topics from the previous posts or address topics that weren't mentioned in the previous posts at all.

If you're not familiar with LSM yet then this Q&A likely won't make much sense to you and I recommend you go back and read through the previous posts.

Please post a comment if one of the answers isn't clear or you have additional questions!

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Label Switched Multicast -- Packet Walk

This post is going to follow a multicast packet as it moves through a sample MPLS network using Label Switched Multicast (LSM). I'll show how the packet moves through the network by looking at the forwarding tables on different routers and also by doing some packet captures.

This post is part of a series I'm writing on LSM and if you're not already familiar with LSM, I recommend you go back and read the previous posts.

After reading this post you will be able to precisely describe how LSM forwarding works in the data plane and will be able to do some basic troubleshooting.

Let's get into the lab!

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Label Switched Multicast -- Configuration

In the previous post (Label Switched Multicast - An Introduction) in this series on Label Switched Multicast (LSM) I introduced the concepts behind LSM and draft-rosen, the two most poplar methods for transporting multicast traffic through MPLS Layer 3 VPNs.

In this article I will talk through the configuration of LSM on the PE and P routers and get to the point where two CEs are successfully passing multicast traffic via the MPLS network. All of the configuration examples will be relevant to Cisco IOS.

As was the case in the introduction article in the series, it's best if you already have a good understanding of multicast and MPLS before reading this article.

At the end of this article you'll be able to start configuring your own LSM environment using the configuration samples here as a template.

To the CLI!

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Label Switched Multicast -- An Introduction

There are two common methods for transporting multicast packets within an MPLS-based Layer 3 VPN:

  1. Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) with Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) (also known as "draft-rosen")
  2. Label Switched Multicast (LSM)

There's also a third method which uses Resource Reservation Protocol-Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE) but I'm not going to get into that one.

In this first post in a series on LSM, I'll describe how draft-rosen works, how LSM works, and then compare and contrast the two. Subsequent posts will focus solely on LSM.

At the end of this post, you will be able to describe conceptually how the control and data planes work with LSM and what the pros and cons are of LSM as compared to draft-rosen.

I will not be covering any theory on multicast or MPLS and will instead recommend that you be familiar with both topics before reading further.

Here we go!

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Choosing a Route: Order of Operations

In Cisco IOS packets are forwarded through the router (or Layer 3 switch) by Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF). A data structure called the CEF table contains a list of known IP prefixes and the outgoing interface that packets should be put on in order to get them onwards to their destination. That's well and good. But how do the IP prefixes make it into the CEF table? To answer that question you have to work backwards and understand the order of operations that IOS goes through in order for a prefix to make it into the CEF table.

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What the *, traceroute?

If you've ever done a traceroute from one IOS box to another, you've undoubtedly seen output like this:

R8# traceroute 192.168.100.7
Tracing the route to 192.168.100.7
VRF info: (vrf in name/id, vrf out name/id)
  1 192.168.0.1 4 msec 3 msec 4 msec
  2 192.168.100.7 4 msec *  0 msec

That msec * msec output. Why is the middle packet always lost?? And why only on the last hop??

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