Labnario Huawei From Scratch

My friend found an interesting command while he was searching Huawei S3700 documentation. It looks like it is possible to check (by command) a state of physical cable, connected to electrical Ethernet or GigabitEthernet interfaces. I have never used it but as soon as I get such switch I promise to test it.

Short description from Hedex:

• When the checked cable is in normal state, the total length of the cable is displayed in the output information.
• If the cable is abnormal, the distance between the interface and the faulty point is displayed.

[Quidway] interface Ethernet 0/0/1
[Quidway-Ethernet0/0/1] virtual-cable-test
Warning: The command will stop service for a while, Continue [Y/N]?y
Pair A length: 189meter(s)
Pair B length: 189meter(s)
Pair C length: 189meter(s)
Pair D length: 189meter(s)
Pair A state: Ok
Pair B state: Ok
Pair C state: Ok
Pair D state: Ok

BGP stands for Border Gateway Protocol. It is widely used among Internet Service Providers to make core routing decisions on the Internet. The current BGP version is BGP-4 defined in RFC 4271.

BGP uses TCP port 179 as its underlying delivery mechanism to increase the reliability of the peer connection. BGP is called a path vector routing protocol. It uses a list of AS numbers through which the packet must pass in order to reach the destination. This list of AS numbers is associated with a BGP route and is called the AS_Path attribute. AS_Path is one of several path attributes associated with each BGP route. How does a BGP select best path to a destination network, you can read at how does BGP select routes.

I do not want to describe BGP in details, as this is out of the scope of this article. What I want to do is to show you, how to configure basic BGP features using Huawei CLI. Especially I want to show you how to:

• run BGP protocol
• configure IBGP peering sessions using peer groups
• configure EBGP peering
• advertise networks.

Do you remember our quiz regarding OSPF Virtual Links?

I have asked you, how many OSPF Virtual Links are required in order to avoid Area0 partitioning, while still maintaining full IP connectivity through the OSPF topology.

Look at the topology in the picture below:

There is a new Huawei website that describes clearly Huawei certification track. Maybe some of you have already found it. For those, who are still looking for such information I am giving a direct link to official Huawei certification track.

I think this is useful news for those, who are interested in passing Huawei certification exams. It was not easy to find such information a few months ago.

It seems that Huawei started to treat its certification seriously.

OSPF virtual link is a tunnel that extends backbone area through a non-backbone area. It is interpreted by the router as unnumbered point-to-point network. Virtual links must be configured between two Area Border Routers. These ABRs are considered neighbours, by establishing the virtual link between them, although they are not linked physically. The transit area (the area through which the virtual link is configured) must have full routing information and cannot be a stub area.

Virtual links add complexity to a network and should be avoided. Use them only as a temporary fix to OSPF topology problem.

Virtual links are used for the following purposes:

• To link an area to the backbone area through a non-backbone area (most common case). On the picture below Area2 was connected to the Area0 via virtual link, which extends Area0 through transit Area1.