JNCIP Lab

jawad1

Hi,

Can somebody guide me to pointers which help me in setting up JNCIP lab using Olive?

Also I would appreciate if somebody can mention the pros and cons of using olive vs routers or olive/router combination.

Thanks.

Aldur

Sure thing

Pro's

cheap, very cheap, compared to buying a low end j-series router on ebay, cheapest is around 500$ USD.

Acts pretty much like a real Juniper router, will do just about everything the real routers will do.

Can do logical router/logical systems, this pretty much allows you to take one olive and split it up into 16 routers. This is something I really wish my j-series routers could do. For this reason I still have olives in use even though I have 8 j-series routers in my lab.

Con's

Pain in the ass to get the needed/supported parts together. Typically you use a old computer with NICs that have specific chipsets. I didn't have to much trouble acquiring the needed NICs but it seemed like most of the time I would get an old comp off of ebay that just wouldn't work with the jinstall file.

All ports in the olives show up as FXP ports which basically work as fast ethernet interfaces. This isn't a problem for the JNCIP and won't hold you back at all. Although you will want to get some experience else where in practicing ATM and SONET interfaces. The real problem with this comes into play when studying for the JNCIE-M. With the FXP ports you can't apply a physical encapsulation which restricts you from doing L2vpn's and L2circuits. You also can't configure a FXP interface under class-of-service, which is in the JNCIE-M book.

You also can't do any sparce-mode multicast since an olive will lack a service interface for first hop and RP PIM register message encaps and decaps.

One last thing is that you need to acquire an jinstall image to load on your prospective olive. This of which is proprietary software so unless you are able to download it from the Juniper web site it might be hard to get started.

So in summary, there are some pro's and con's that I've run into with olives, all in all it's a great and relatively cheap way to learn Juniper routers but they do come with a few limitations.


A great resource on building olives is below. I used sid smokes guide to build mine and it was all I really needed.

Sid Smokes

another good resource is juniper cluepon

Olive - JuniperClue

There's also instructions in cluepon about putting together an olive on vmware, which would help bypass the whole acquiring old PC's and NIC's issue. I've never done it but have had friends who have and it worked great for them.

Anywho, have a look and let me know if you have any questions.

jawad1

Thanks Aldur. I appreciate your detailed reply. I will see if I can expense the cost of the routers to the company and then I will certainly go with routers.

Aldur

no problem and if you can get your company to pay for the routers that would definitely be the way to go.

Wish my company would pay for some gear