Off Topic Friday

[charles at thefnf.org (charles at thefnf.org)]

On 2014-05-30 16:09, Alain Hebert wrote:
> Well happy friday.
> 
>     We're planning to build a MPLS lab this summer.

What's this? Operational related content on a Friday? *angrily hurls 
popcorn across the room*. LOL.

MPLS lab sounds cool. For students? Already experienced engineers? 
Simulating a production environment? Tell us more details please! :)

> 
>     If anyone has suggestion for cheap hardware to simulate a
> implementation of all the RFC's from the Core to the CPE.

Hmmmm. Good question. Any particular vendors you want to emulate? C/J I 
presume (maybe interop between them)? They do have official VM versions 
freely available of representative sampling of their product lines now 
days. Start there? Run it on a digtial ocean cloud? (They are currently 
$MY_FAV_CLOUD_PROVIDER) Or if you've got some spare server class kit 
kicking around your nearest colo then just load up Ubuntu 12.04 and 
Virtualbox (or heck, even w2k12/w8 which is what I'm using for my 
network vm lab). I've got...

HP (comware something something (v7? I dunno) . Oh and they have some 
cloud router deal to, I think I grabbed that.
Arista (got this at SCALE this year). Not sure if you can grab it 
"officially offically"
Cisco (asa, asr and that cloud router thing)
Juniper (mx emulator something someting)
Huewai (eNSP)
GNS3

I'm not at home right now, I'll put the links to the above item 
downloads on my lab wiki and update the thread (I'm embarrassed I didn't 
do that already).


Of course there is also OpenDaylight and other Linuxish stuff. But 
that's beyond MPLS. Linux/BSD MPLS seems to be not so great last I 
looked.


> 
>     it would be greatly appreciated.

Same here.

> 
> From our research,
> 
>     It is pretty much all over the place, like the vendor did it on
> purpose to milk all the money they could from the spec :).

Haha.

> 
>     As usual, off-list would be best.

If it's cool with 10k of my closest friends, I'd say this would be a 
welcome on list topic?