Happy Friyay Everyone!
Today, we’re doing a special “Release Edition” of our Feature Fridays. On May 20th, we released the 5.6.0 version of the Session Smart Routing software, which includes a lot of cool new features!
Today, I want to highlight the top 4 features that stood out to me:
- RADIUS Support for MFA
- Config Concurrency
- STEP High Availability
- BFD for Routing Protocols
RADIUS Support for Multi-Factor Authentication:
This is one I have heard requested many times during my life as a Technical Trainer. In case you aren’t familiar, when it comes to Role-Based Access Control with your Session Smart Router, you can already use locally created usernames and passwords or you can link your SSR up to an LDAP Server. However, with the release of 5.6.0, the SSR can now integrate with your RADIUS user access to support Multi-Factor Authentication using Yubikey.
Configuration Concurrency at Scale:
If you’ve ever had multiple people working on configuration on your Session Smart Routers at the same time, you know how annoying it can be when you all try to hit commit at the same time. The way it works is each user makes edits locally to a candidate configuration. When they have completed their edits locally, they commit the config to the Conductor and changes are merged into the running configuration. As other users complete and commit their changes, the updated running configuration is compared to each candidate configuration for conflicts. If none exist, the local changes are committed to the running configuration on the Conductor. To learn more, Check out the documentation on this feature. And, watch this video by @Jenna, which explains how the feature works and how to use it.
STEP High Availability:
Have you been using STEP, but concerned about what the loss of connectivity to one STEP Repository would mean for all of your STEP routes? Well, not to worry. The SSR now has STEP Repo High Availability! You will need an HA Conductor deployment for this to work, but once you have that, you can put a STEP Repo on both Conductor nodes, and then you have STEP Repo HA! Also, with 5.6.0, Routers in HA (2 nodes) are supported with STEP.
BFD for Routing Protocols:
Hopefully you are aware that your Session Smart Routers can already share routes to other routers (SSRs and non-SSRs) using BGP and OSPF. They can also use BFD to communicate with their Peers (SSRs) and quickly change routes when they learn a Peer is unreachable. Well, with 5.6.0, we can now use BFD to influence our BGP and OSPF routes! This allows for faster detection of an outage and route update for that outage. BFD can be enabled on the OSPF interface or the BGP neighbor.
To learn more about these features and the others released in 5.6.0, see this link.
Now, we want to hear from you! Let us know what you are thinking:
- Which 5.6.0 feature excites you the most?
- When will you start playing around with 5.6.0?
- Once you get some experience with some of these new features, let us know what you think about them and if they solve any of your current issues.
Just as a note, 5.6.0 is released as Limited Availability or LA. This means you will want to do thorough testing before putting it on your network. For more on the Product Lifecycle Support Policy, click here.
Looking forward to hearing back from you! Take care!
#FeatureFridays #SSR #SessionSmartRouter #5.6 #RADIUS #STEP #BFD #configuration
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Justin Melloni
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