After the last post when I had built up and installed my new Dynamips server along with a set of Sun Quad NIC cards (501-4366, HME or Happy Meal as they are also known) I started to run into some issues.
After building a simple topology with one router connected to my 3550 I was seeing each device in the others CDP table which was good. It wasn’t until today when I was trying to lab something up where two routers connected via that external 3550 (using 2 ports on the quad NIC) would not form a neighbourship, everything was checked and sure enough they couldn’t even ping each other.
I checked the ARP table and there were entries and they were all correct and when I ran a set of debugs between the routers the packets were arriving however there was something wrong with the packets as the router was simply dropping them. Continue reading