RFC 5798 Brings IPv6 to VRRP
RFC 5798 was published this week, formalizing the latest incarnation of Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). VRRPv3 introduces support for IPv6 in addition to IPv4.
One might wonder why VRRP is necessary for IPv6 at all, given that IPv6 includes robust router discovery as part of its Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol. Section 1.3 of the RFC explains it well (emphasis mine):
Neighbor Discovery (ND) includes a mechanism called Neighbor Unreachability Detection to detect the failure of a neighbor node (router or host) or the forwarding path to a neighbor. This is done by sending ...
The Science of Network Troubleshooting
A number of people have written asking me what happened to a paper I wrote back in 2008 entitled "The Science of Network Troubleshooting." Unfortunately, I neglected to republish the paper after revamping packetlife.net in late 2009, so here it is again as a blog article.
Troubleshooting is not an art. Along with many other IT methodologies, it is often referred to as an art, but it's not. It's a science, if ever there were one. Granted, someone with great skill in troubleshooting can make it seem like a natural talent, the same way a professional ball ...
Navigating Cisco.com Documentation
From what I've seen interacting with other engineers, it seems that most of us, when we need to research something relevant to Cisco networking, go straight to Google. This is typically the most expedient path toward an answer, but it isn't necessarily the most reliable or the most accurate. The problem is that Google or another search engine will direct you to whatever resource on cisco.com it considers most relevant; one must be careful to consider the hardware platform and/or IOS version specific to the situation at hand.
For example, an engineer who googles for documentation concerning the configuration of a particular IOS feature will often find what he needs, but may not be aware that the documentation he is looking at is for a newer or older version of software, or that it applies to a family of hardware different from the device he is configuring. This might not be a problem all the time, but it is a good way to get bitten by minor differences in supported features and configuration syntax.
A more reliable approach is to navigate Cisco's documentation manually to find the exact information you need. People often complain that Cisco's online documentation is too difficult to navigate, but after digging through it numerous times to find references for the many blog articles I've written, I think it merely takes a bit of strategy. That's why I decided to write this article.


