Cisco SAMI blades....and ASA 5580's

I have worked for the last 3 or so years now with the cisco GGSN/CSG aka CMX (Cisco Mobile Exchange) supporting gsm,gprs and UMTS on the 7613 platform.

The old boxes were getting sort of old and tired, They also have the new ASR5000 (starent acquisition) that I believe to be by far more superior than what they were pushing.

Anyway pending some decisions, cisco being the nice guys they are actually sent some brand new toys for me to test. Please see attached....this is going to be a great week:-) I get to lab up the entire topology and integrate the new toys:-)

**Last three images are the sami blades







I also get to play around with the Cisco ASA 5580 with GTP inspection licence. Now this has been on my wish list for a while now. Swapping out the almost old firewalls for re-deployment will be easy. The fun is mainly in the higher number of supported interfaces and their capacity (10G), the gtp inspection will save our GGSN's quite alot of resources....oh well some photos (yes I opened them up to see what's in there).....

I'll post a review of both next time.....
I have some requests for easy to understand terms when dealing with gsm/gprs/umts mobility....I'll see about that too...Its just so wide I don't know where to start so if you have some ideas please let me know....

what was cooking today:

after the csg/ggsn exploits, the better part of my week is freed up. I like it when I do something and the impact is felt almost immediately by customers, the feedback is quite refreshing.

An assesor lab some time back showed me weak on IPv6, multicast and i need to polih up on L2 technologies.

Either way I think Im still on track for the CCIE. time to start redirecting my finances towards this goal. This is probably going to be the most painful one since money is hard to come by.

anyway,,...I was on the following links today for other reasons mainly work related, and since its slowly becoming clear that data center networking might be my next bread and butter:-)

**Yes I had nowhere to book mark the pages and needed a quick reference point...:-)

Configuring Enhanced Service-Aware Billing - on the ggsn ( i deal with mobility so ggsn's sgsn,s are sort of my main dish:-)
Technical Resources for the Enterprise - Cisco Design Zone
Data Center Assurance Program (DCAP) 3.0
Protocol Compliance Statements for the CSG 3.1(3)C7(1)
Cisco DCAP Data Mobility Manager (DMM) Design Guide (External)

CMX CSG upgrade:

Today had me doing an MOP for some upgrades. This is for a cisco CMX running on a 7613 chassis. It assumes you plug in a CSG module on slot 13 and it doesn't have the right software installed but you have it on disk0 on the supervisor.

Next I will show how to put it together with some ggsn's, configure and test billing for mobile users.

CMX1#dir
Directory of disk0:/
5 -rw- 4736628 Jun 25 2008 02:33:06 +03:00 c6csg-apc.31-3.C7.7.bin

The above shows the image we want is in disk0
Now make the file above accessible via tftp as follows:

CMX1(config)#tftp-server bootflash: c6csg-apc.31-3.C7.7.bin

Now the file above can be reached and picked via tftp by the csg. Another alternative is to use our tftp server.

CMX1#session slot 13 processor 0

The default escape character is Ctrl-^, then x.

You can also type 'exit' at the remote prompt to end the session

Trying 127.0.0.50 ... Open

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

www.C o n t e n t w

www.S e r v i c e s w

www.G a t e w a y w

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

CSG> dir

usage

upgrade slot0:|server-ip-addr filename

ping ip-addr

show ...

copy coredump tftp|rcp ip-addr filename [rcp-user]

capture [on|off]

pktlog ...

exit

CSG> upgrade slot0: c6csg-apc.31-3.C7.7.bin

Upgrading System Image 1

CSG ExImage Nov 8 2007

R/W| Reading:lam_ppc.bin..DONE Writing:lam_ppc.bin..DONE

Read 13 files in download image. (13,0,0)

Saving image state for image 1...done.

CSG> exit

Good Bye.

[Connection to 127.0.0.10 closed by foreign host]

You should get output similar to the above.

CMX1# hw-module mod 13 reset

When the module comes up sh mod should give the output almost exactly like below:

CMX1#sh mod

5 0001.c9dd.0f5e to 0001.c9dd.0f65 1.4 3.1(3)C7(7) Ok

That’s it your CSG is upgraded.