AXP Tips and Tricks

Every once and while the Planets line up the stars intersect certain orbital planes and something awesome happens. Like the time when I drank my first Newcastle Ale or learning how to fish with a Rapala X-Rap or my Mother in Law canceled her week stay at our house. Every once and while, something cool happens. At Cisco, for me that event was the AXP module. I know it sounds kinda cheesy but the AXP is something I have been waiting on for a long time. The ability to interact directly with a router via a native API and not just the router but the modular code constructs inside the IOS itself. I played around with the CUAE for a while, writing my own applications for voice stuff. I also wrote a bunch of TCL scripts for EEM apps on the Catalyst line. It was a real hoot but still I wanted to write code that could mine info from all areas of the router. Then I was introduced to the AXP. This is the interactive part of the blog; download “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith and press play, NOW. Picture me, in a field of green lush grass swinging the AXP module around in a slow circle…Man, Valentines day is really getting to me… Anyway… I am a huge fan of the AXP, but along the way I have made some mistakes and learned better ways of using the module. So here are a few quick tips to overcome some of the issues I had with the AXP. 00×01 Java I was out a customer a site trying to get the Java SDK 1.5 working on the AXP and could never get it to go. Good ole Anurag Gurtu showed me the light on this one. By default the AXP supports IBM J9. To use the Java 1.5 SDK then all you need to do is: – Download the SDK – Package build it with the pkg_build script – Install the app – Then set JAVA_HOME and then your ready to go 00×02 Multicasting Many of the coolest ideas out there today revolve around multicasting. But how do we get the AXP to multicast thru the router itself. The router config is simple enough right: config t ip multicast-routing interface fa0/0 ip pim sparse-dense-mode ip igmp version 3 exit interface Integrated-Service-Engine1/0 ip pim sparse-dense-mode ip igmp version 3 end Now I just add a multicast route on the AXP: ip route 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0