Bridging the gap between CCIE RS and SP

Lately I’ve been very curious about Junos. It also just so happened that we got a loan M10 (End-of-life?) from Juniper to ‘test’. Somehow it was decided that the best way to test is to put it in the production network. IMO this was not a bright move as there will be no tinkering with it, but anyhow, a good chance to get some exposure to the OS while it is still new and interesting. I’ve managed to simulate a juniper router with vmware using the files available for download on the torrent sites. Searching for ‘torrent olive vmware’ is a good start. Olive is in a way very similar to dynamips. In the coming weeks I will post some newbie level posts about my findings.

Juniper Certs
Im really keen on getting one Juniper cert, just for fun. Why for fun? JNCIS-ER Juniper cant be serious either right? One good thing about the Juniper certs though is that the Professional level cert is also a practical as like the expert level exam. The written for the Professional level also recertifies the expert level exam. Thats all fun and games, but there is no-way Im getting serious e.g JNCIE-M/T (reminds me of the ugliest car ever) until they make it look professional e.g JCIE looks sweet to me, that I wont mind putting along side CCIE on a business card.

Juniper blogs
While looking for juniper blogs, I found some interesting posts by Jeff Doyle that I thought was worth a mention. The posts cover the basics, suitable for people like me who have absolutely no idea. Jeff’s posts thus far:
Navigating a JUNOS Configuration
The JUNOS Software Architecture
Adding JUNOS to Your Repertoire

Booting Junos
Before continuing I have to mention that I have no idea what Im doing, so take everything juniper related with a pinch of salt.

Strictly speaking the Junos license requires the OS to be run on a juniper device, but I have to believe that for the purpose of learning the OS, Juniper would allow the use of an Olive. The package I downloaded had all the files included as well as the multicast patch already applied. After extracting I had the vwmare files and also the vwmare workstation. Steps taken to boot the olive:
1) Install Vmware Workstation
2) Boot the Olive.vmx in the Vmware Workstation

Thats it, pretty simple compared to dynamips. I had one thing I couldnt resolve by searching on the net. After login in as ‘root’ the Os took me too a ~# prompt, I was expecting > as suggested in Jeff’s posts. With some trial and error I typed the lucky command ‘cli’. This command takes the device from unix mode to router mode or ‘operational mode’:

login: root
[]:~#
[]:~# cli
root>

Once the OS is in this ‘router mode’ or ‘operational mode’ it starts to look, feel and react more like a router and less as a unix box. At first I could not ‘commit’ any new configuration. It is necessary to first set the root password:

root> configure
[edit]
root# set system host-name home
root# commit
[edit] ’system’ Missing mandatory statement:
‘root-authentication’ error: commit failed:
(missing statements)
root# set system root-authentication plain-text-password somepass
root# commit
root@home#

The next objective is to boot a second router and get the two to talk to each other.