Junos 1

I want to get into networking. Now that I have my Network+ and I'm starting school here pretty soon I want to have dive into this because it feels interesting to me. I did some looking, and I found a Juniper EX2300-C-12P on eBay for about $100. I want to go with Juniper as that's what we use at work, and it's a big brand that looks like more companies are turning to due to Cisco's abstract licensing. I've seen first-hand Juniper's isn't perfect either but from various sources I could find it seems better. Though the bigger reason is using it at work. Though I am not the network admin I do understand a good amount of basics and I listen to a lot of the conversations that happen while we're implementing new equipment.

So, now that I made the purchase, what am I going to do on it. I asked my coworker this, and they recommended the Day One/Getting Started pages from Juniper. So we'll start there.

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Day One+ (EX2300-C)

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/quick-start/ex2300-c/ex2300c-day-one-plus.pdf

First thing first after plugging it in and waiting a few minutes for it to fully boot I tried using the default login and couldn't get in. Looking back I should've seen if there was anything further I could try, but I ended up clearing the config by holding the button on the front for 10–12 seconds till the interfaces light up. Now when logging in and typing root for username I'm in. Typing cli then show configuration shows the current config

Now I will say that I know a few commands or have an idea of them at lease. For example, I should've added ```| no-more``` to not have to press space every few lines. But otherwise I will be learning a lot as I go. Continuing in this document I need to remove the Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) config which makes sense as I don't have other infrastructure for this switch to provision from. But it doesn't exist so continuing on.

Next we set a root password. For simplicity, I will use plain text but eventually swap over to encrypted. I could do SSD public key string but unsure the complexity of it so we'll see.

Now it says to commit, but I know ```show | compare``` command will show some info, so I'll see what it gives before committing.

Next we set a DNS name. I went with TestEX2300. It's short and simple. The guide then wants to set IP address on the management interface, ssh root login, DNS server, and SNMP, but I won't be doing any of that yet.

The hostname is set, and this guide is done. I will continue with the Getting Started with Junos OS document...

After reading, it's very similar but shows how to set up a user. I want to add a user with full control that can access via SSH for local LAN administration.

I have seen similar things done before, but it was nice walking through myself. I'm unsure if I'll show every single command output in future ones but maybe the entire log at the end. It was at this point I tried to plug the switch into my router (directly no L2 switches in between) and I couldn't ping it. After a bit of toying with the router I had to set the native VLAN to my home labbing VLAN (the switch is only device and no internet access) and not allow any tagged VLANs. Unsure why I couldn't allow tagging but I can now SSH to it and it properly blocks root access.

Thanks for reading!