Tag Archives: Cisco

SSH into Cisco STPs

Mobile Networks, SDM, , , ,

If it ain’t broke don’t fix is an addage that the telecom industry has well and truly applied to the SS7 space.

If you’ve got an SS7 network (especially one built on TDM links) the general philosophy is don’t touch it and hope to retire before it dies.

The Cisco STP (Internet Transfer Point) is a good example of this, and for that reason I still work on them.

But OpenSSH and standards have moved on, and SSHing into them these days requires some extra (insecure) parameters to access, so here they are:

ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -caes128-cbc [email protected]

Will get you into an Version 12.3(4r)T4 Cisco ITP. Be sure to run sho ver and marvel at that uptime!

Cisco ITP / SS7 STP – Viewing MTP3 traffic from TDM Links

Mobile Networks, SDM, Software, VoIP, , , , ,

Okay, so a little late to the party on this one…

The other day I had to setup a TDM (E1) based SS7 link (oh yes my friend – they still exist) to interconnect with another operator.

I’m using Cisco’s ITP product as the STP / Signaling Gateway, and my trusty port mirror for what’s going on doesn’t extend down to TDM links.

But I found out you can mirror MTP3 traffic from TDM links in the STP!

Firstly we’ve got to define the remote destination to send the TDM mirrored traffic to, and an access list to match all SS7 traffic:

cs7 paklog your.ip.for.sniffing dest-port 514
access-list 2700 instance 0 permit all

Next up we start a debug session for traffic matching that access list:

debug cs7 mtp3 paklog 2700

And then over on your monitoring box (the IP you specified in your.ip.for.sniffing ) fire up Wireshark and voila!

All our MTP3 traffic!

This was super useful for ensuring the ITP was working correctly as a signaling gateway and passing the M3UA packets over onto MTP3 MSUs.