Tagged: juniper
22 posts · browse all tags
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Five Minutes and an Empty Port Part 10: The Closing Checklist and a Vendor Comparison
Closing the series: a practical checklist pulling Parts 7 through 9 together, and a straight comparison of how Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper, and Arista actually implement each control.
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OSPF Deep Dive Part 10: A Vendor-Neutral Troubleshooting Methodology
A structured way to diagnose OSPF problems that works on any vendor, because it's built on the neighbor state machine from Part 1, not on any platform's specific commands: what state is it stuck at, and what does that state rule in or out.
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OSPF Deep Dive Part 11: Show Commands and the LSDB, Side by Side
The same neighbor table, interface state, and LSDB, read through three different command sets: Cisco IOS/IOS-XE, FortiOS, and Junos, mapped side by side against the CORE-CSR/BRANCH-FGT/EDGE-MX lab from this series.
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OSPF Deep Dive Part 12: A Multi-Vendor Outage, Start to Finish
A closing walkthrough on the CORE-CSR/BRANCH-FGT/EDGE-MX lab: a complaint with no down interfaces and no failed adjacencies anywhere, a red herring that turns out to be real but irrelevant, and a root cause that traces straight back to Part 3's reference-bandwidth warning.
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OSPF Deep Dive Part 4: Virtual Links, Summarization, and Redistribution
Fixing the lab's missing backbone connection with a virtual link, then summarizing at the ABR and redistributing a static route at the NSSA's ASBR, with working syntax on Cisco, FortiOS, and Junos for each.
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OSPF Deep Dive Part 5: OSPFv3 and Running OSPF Over IPv6
OSPFv3 isn't OSPFv2 with bigger addresses. It separates topology from addressing, drops built-in authentication in favor of IPsec, and runs over link-local addresses by default, plus the per-vendor syntax to bring it up on Cisco, FortiOS, and Junos.
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OSPF Deep Dive Part 6: Authentication and Security Hardening
What an unauthenticated OSPF segment actually exposes, why plaintext and MD5 authentication are both weaker than they look, and how to configure HMAC-SHA key chains on Cisco, FortiOS, and Junos.
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OSPF Deep Dive Part 9: Junos Implementation and Gotchas
EDGE-MX's configuration: why Junos never adds an interface to OSPF by accident, the policy-based redistribution model, and the one default that catches Cisco and FortiOS engineers off guard, OSPF outranking eBGP by default.
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Contrail SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 1: Contrail Service Orchestration and the SRX/NFX CPE Model
Before Session Smart Routing, Juniper's enterprise SD-WAN ran on Contrail Service Orchestration — an SDN/NFV control plane repurposed for site connectivity, provisioning SRX firewalls and NFX universal CPE. This post walks the architecture as it actually shipped.
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Contrail SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 2: E-Hub, P-Hub, and the Anatomy of a Hub-and-Spoke Overlay
Contrail's hub-and-spoke model ran on two hub roles — the customer-owned enterprise hub and the multi-tenant provider hub. Routing, VRF segmentation, and traffic-flow mechanics of both, and why the model got heavy at scale.
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Contrail SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 3: Why Contrail Lost the Enterprise, and the Pivot to Session Smart
Closing the Contrail arc: a straight comparison against Viptela, VeloCloud, and CloudGenix, what CSO's architecture cost it competitively, and the specific rationale Juniper gave for retiring it in favour of Session Smart Routing.
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From Contrail to Session Smart: A History of Juniper's SD-WAN Journey
Juniper has shipped two structurally different SD-WAN products under one brand: Contrail Service Orchestration, born out of an SDN/NFV controller, and Session Smart Routing, born out of a 2014 session-border-controller team's bet that tunnels were the wrong abstraction. This is how one became the other.
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Juniper Session Smart SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 1: 128 Technology and the Tunnel-Free Premise
Session Smart Routing didn't start as a Juniper project — it started as a session border controller team's bet that SD-WAN's entire tunnel-based premise was solving the wrong problem. This post covers 128 Technology's origin and the architectural break it made.
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Juniper Session Smart SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 2: Secure Vector Routing — Tenants, Services, and Session Metadata
How Secure Vector Routing actually forwards a session: the tenant/service data model, the metadata the ingress router stamps on the first packet, and why that's enough to route symmetrically without a tunnel.
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Juniper Session Smart SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 3: Session Smart Conductor, Mist, and the Two Control Planes
Session Smart Routers can be managed by an on-premises Conductor or by the Mist cloud. What each control plane actually does, how the multitenant policy model gets distributed, and how to choose between them.
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Juniper Session Smart SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 4: WAN Assurance, Marvis, and AI-Native Operations
What "AI-native WAN" concretely means on the Mist side of Juniper's SD-WAN stack: WAN Assurance's telemetry model, Marvis's self-driving remediation, and where the AI layer actually earns its keep versus where it's a dashboard feature.
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Juniper Session Smart SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 5: Zero Trust by Default — the SSR Security Model
Because SVR classifies every session against a tenant and a service before forwarding a single packet, deny-by-default segmentation is a property of the routing engine itself. What that buys, what it doesn't, and how SRX fills the gap.
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Juniper Session Smart SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 6: Cloud Onramp and Multicloud
Extending Secure Vector Routing into AWS and Azure: virtual SSR instances, cloud regions treated as ordinary sites in the tenant/service model, and how that compares to the tunnel-based cloud onramp patterns already covered on this site.
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Juniper Session Smart SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 7: The MPLS Cutover Playbook
A practical staged cutover from legacy MPLS to Session Smart Routing — overlay-first coexistence, tenant/service modelling before a single circuit changes, and why SVR's tunnel-free design changes the risk profile of the cutover weekend itself.
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Juniper Session Smart SD-WAN Deep Dive Part 8: Failure Modes, Scale Limits, and a Five-Way Vendor Comparison
Series finale. What happens to the data plane when Conductor or Mist goes dark, where SSR's scale story sits, and Session Smart Routing lined up against Fortinet, Cisco/Viptela, Arista/VeloCloud, and Palo Alto/Prisma — five philosophies, one underlying question.
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From DSCP to Deep Packet Inspection: Why SDWAN Application-Aware Routing Killed Traditional QoS
A deep technical comparison of legacy QoS (DSCP/CoS, static priority queues, box-by-box CLI) against SDWAN Application-Aware Routing — plus a vendor-by-vendor breakdown of how Cisco Catalyst SDWAN, Fortinet, Juniper Mist (128T), and VeloCloud actually identify and steer application traffic.
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Adding Vendor Route-Table Parsers to route-compare, and Why the Work Lives on a Branch
A follow-up on the route-compare tool: I taught it to read raw show ip route, get router info routing-table all, show route, and show routing route output directly — no Excel cleanup step. The work lives on a branch rather than on main, and this is why.