Just finish teaching the Cisco UCS (DCUCI) course this week, I find that there is a small bug about the Unified port configuration and want to share in this blog entry.
As in the lab, it requires to configure last few ports of the Fabric Interconnect as FC uplink ports, while we are using the 6248 Fabric Interconnect, which by default the ports are unified ports, so need to first configure them as the FC ports.
The ports to be configured are all the ports in the expansion slot. By using the UCSM, select the corresponding Fabric Interconnect, and click the Configured Unified Ports:




In the popup window, select the Configure Expansion Module Ports: 

Drag the slide bar, so that the right hand side ports will become FC ports. Then click Finish.

What happen is that you would expect that those configured ports should be appeared under the Uplink FC port, however nothing is found there!

 So how can you fix it, you need to Disable All Ports:

 Then re-enable all the ports again:

Now all the FC uplink ports appear:

- Kepler (Cisco Certified System Instructor #20388, since 1998)

When teaching the Cisco Firewall (ASA) course last week, there is a question about the port chnanel and failover policy. As for the failover policy, you can specify how many monitored interface fail will trigger the failover (default is one). The question is if port channel is being used, then will it treated as one single interface or as number of underlying physical interface.

Though not actually tested out, by using the ASDM wizard to setup failover, there is a screen to select the interface being monitored.

If you have created a port channel, you can only select the port channel interface to be monitored instead of the underlying physical interfaces, see figures below:

That means, from the failover policy of view, it will just count the port channel interface as one single interface disregarding how many underlying physical interfaces it consists of.

When teaching the H3CNE class, one of the questions is about the compatibility of the HDLC encapsulation of H3C router with Cisco router. As Cisco HDLC is well known to be a propriety implementation, while H3C doesn’t state clearly about its implementation.
So what’s the answer? Maybe you want to try it out by yourself. You don’t need to have the actual device, you can use the H3C simulator (LITO) and Cisco simulator (GNS3) to test it out. If you don’t know where to download it, please visit my other Blog entry.
Now, how to emulate the serial connection between GNS3 and LITO, as both of them support the using of UDP session to emulate the serial connection, however the underlying implementation is different, so you can’t directly connect them together. Instead you can use the UBridge tool to bridge them. Following diagram illustrates the connection.

You need to create 2 different UDP sessions:  one session between the Cisco Router to the UDP Bridge, the other between the H3C Router to the UDP Bridge.
So you require2 pairs of UDP port numbers, e.g. Cisco serial interface use 2012, UBridge to Cisco use 5212, H3C interface use 3012, UBridge to H3C use 5312.

LITO configuration under the “hardcfg.tcl”:
AddSerial  -slot 1 -local 127.0.0.1 -lport 3012 -dest 10.1.1.2 -dport 5312

GNS3 configuration (please consult the GNS document): udp:"2011:10.1.1.2:5211"

While for the UBridge, you need to create 2 legs and put them into a group, you can choose any group number. E.g. group 3. Now you can start the UBridge as follows:
c:\iptools>ubdg 3#C:S@5212:127.0.0.1:2012 3#H:S@5312:127.0.0.1:3012

In the H3C router console, configure the serial link use hdlc encapsulation. E.g.:

[R1]interface Serial0/1/2
[R1-Serial0/1/2]link-protocol hdlc

In the Cisco end, just “no shutdown” the interface, (as Cisco by default use) . then both H3C and Cisco’s interface will become up.
Now, you get the answer.