Well alright…. the switch upgrade team has installed one Cisco Catalyst 4510, and are prepping another Cisco Catalyst 4503 to burn in the Cisco MAB project.

Just in time, we finished sorting the MAC address to vlan assignments from the old URT XML file. Now we can start entering the MAC addresses into ACS with the appropriate IETF Radius vlan assignment options compatible with MAB.

We also have some exciting movement in our Zenoss v3.1/Ubuntu 10.10 labs and will be rolling out another project related to this lab soon…..

Our Cisco MAB project is currently on hold. We are waiting for the switch deployment team to replace the next set of switches. This part of the project is in a short design phase, as the team is working on replacing 2 x Catalyst 4006 switches with one Catalyst 4510, with an appropriate IOS version for Standalone MAB, as noted in our requirements brief.

Once this switch replacement is complete we will continue with the testing phase of the MAB project. This will also give us time to load all the MAC addresses from the old URT system into the new Cisco Secure ACS v4.2 server.

Meanwhile cloudguys.net is prepping to fire up a new project alpha. This project has been hotting up in our lab for a couple of months now. This new project is geared toward the importance of external cloud and vps service monitoring. Stay tuned.

1. Determined to have both URT and MAB running in the same environment, because all affected switches will not be replaced at the same time.
2. Collected MAC and Vlan assignments from URT xml file. This file is located on the URT Administration server. Read more…

Requirements:

1. Cisco Secure ACS (radius) server minimum v3.2
1. We chose ACS v4.2 windows based, virtualized on Cisco UCS platform for easy recovery.
2. List of switches that Read more…

Scenario:

The network has approximately 500 nodes in a large single building, spread about several floors. This campus network consists of a pair of Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches for the Layer3 core with about 30 vlans. Approximately 35 campus Layer2 switches, which are mostly Cisco Catalyst 4006. All vlans trunked from the core.

No private WiFi, roaming notebooks, or other devices need wired access to private vlans. Read more …

Cisco MAB = MAC Authentication Bypass

Interesting new project for an engineer that has spent his career in everything from small LAN, large WAN, and data center support.

While reading up on the protocol, I have found it to be most suited for a campus style network.

Cisco MAB seems well suited for this scenario.

The network has approximately 500 nodes in a large single building spread about several floors. This campus consists of a pair of Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches for the Layer3 core. Approximately 30 campus Layer2 switches, which are mostly Cisco Catalyst 4006.

Why MAB, and whats it for? I will explain this in an upcoming projects implementation post. Read more…

For a Cisco primer look here.