Frame-Relay oddities/tips

Being stuck in a hotel room in DC due to the huge snow storm, I decided to get some study in today. As mentioned, I started with INE Workbook Volume 1. I skipped the first section, bridging and switching due to the lack of access to real 3560's. I plan to touch these later once I get some rack time rented.

The second section is all frame relay. Here are a few things I found out.

• You can disable inverse-arp per DLCI "no frame inverse-arp ip 201"
• An interesting way to disable inverse-arp is to put those DLCIs that you do not want dynamic mappings for into an "empty" subinterface. With no IP address on that interface, inverse-arp will be disabled for those DLCIs.
• When configuring frame-relay End-to-End keepalives, you need to configure the windows/thresholds/timers on both ends. For some reason, I thought the receive end would reply appropriately...
• Nothing new here but a good reminder for anyone else - for back-to-back frame-relay, you have to disable LMI keepalives. Without a frame-relay switch, there are no LMIs.
• You can fine-tune frame-relays broadcast queue.
  "frame-relay broadcast-queue 100 256000 36"
• You can bridge using frame-relay! Word of warning, this is inconsistent on dynamips but it does work. I just didn't get every ping through, even though the spanning tree instance was stable.

1. Enable frame-relay on serial interfaces (encap frame)
2. Disable IP routing and remove IP addresses on pertinent bridge routers
3. Create bridge (bridge 1 proto ieee)
4. Attach interfaces to bridge. To bridge across frame-relay and fast ethernet just attach bridge-group 1
   
5. Bridge frame-relay (frame map bridge 205 broadcast)
6. Test!

• They also cover frame-relay switching but the scenario said to not use the frame-relay route command. I scratched my head thinking of some interface-dlci/local-dlci flip-flop. I peeked ahead to the solution to find the connect command. You simply put in the interfaces, and the DLCI and it's supposed to work. Unfortunately, due to the IOS version I'm running, or dynamips - I could not get it to work. In any event, it's good to have this command available.

These are my complete notes for frame relay. It took me all day to get through this small lab, mostly due to the slow Internet speed accessing my servers at home. Hope someone else finds this useful! I hope to get some more studying in later this week and when I do, I will be sure to post my notes!