Managing Devices With Your Blackberry
ccie-rs January 14th, 2009
Last year I ended up upgrading my Blackjack i607 cell phone to a Blackberry 8820. Basically I did this so it was easier to manage emails from my various contracts. I don’t really have to go into the basic functions of the phone, since many of you may already have one joined at your hip. One of the software packages I would recommend downloading and installing on your phone is called MidpSSH — it’s a free telnet/SSH client that works pretty well and will allow you to manage your equipment. I installed and tested a few others out there, but many of the free versions had too many bugs.
Since my Blackberry was already tied to the client’s Blackberry server to service my email portion, I had the ability to browse and conduct most management functions (i.e. ping checks) over the Internet. When managing a device with this utility, you have to realize you won’t be able to do so with blazing speeds. In fact, it may seem like you are running over a dial-up connection when you first try it out, but in the end it may still prove useful for any quick fix.
Yesterday while I was in transit, I received a call for support to look at a core router. The client was trying to determine the optimal routing path for several servers through traceroute. Unfortunately, the client found that in passing ICMP packets to a certain core router in the path that he was unable to receive the echo-replies. I quickly remembered that there was a DENY_ICMP access-list assigned on the interface that was most likely prohibiting ICMP all together and needed to figure out the quickest way to remove it.
(On a side note, one of my personal goals this year was to minimize my own clutter. One of the ways of achieving that was to reduce the amount of hardware I carried around in my pockets and my backpack, which meant my laptop and the many cables/accessories that came with it will now sit at home.)
To give you some background of the client, they have an external monitoring service co-located in downtown LA. One of the devices in the co-lo is a router that has a VPN tied back to the client office and allows telnet access on the external interface from the Blackberry server IP address.
In order to access the equipment, I opened up the MidpSSH utility on the Blackberry, selected ‘Sessions’, typed in the IP address of the co-lo router, and selected ‘Connect’. After entering my credentials, I was immediately logged into the co-lo router. From this point, I had to reverse telnet (with the /source-interface option) to a distribution switch that was connected to the core router. From the distribution switch I was able reverse SSH into the core router and remove the ACL from the interface.
All in all, it took me only 15 minutes.
