Juniper Home Lab - virtual lab topology on a single physical device

One of the things I've wanted for a long time is a few Juniper devices lying around my home to keep my Juniper CLI skills up to scratch and to experiment with new concepts as I learn them. Sure, you can run great labs in things like EVE-NG, but you ultimately need licensed VM images (and a machine with a fair amount of RAM and CPU grunt for any complex topologies), and those licenses are quite expensive (although if you have a juniper.net login, you can download a free 60 day evaluation copy of vMX router, vSRX firewall or vQFX switch; apparently, you can simply recycle trial licenses - not that this is recommended [see e.g. page 351 of the Junos beginner's Day One guide]). Indeed, even if you (re)use trial licenses, you'll probably need a fairly hefty - expensive - server to run them on, which will cost a similar amount to quite a lot of second hand devices; the key advantage of the former, perhaps, is you're more likely to have a more current Junos image to work with in the virtualised space as opposed to from the old second hand gear market.

Old second hand Juniper gear, however, is quite cheap, and although you won't get support or upgrades, will then also not cost you any ongoing support. I'd be very wary of downloading random Junos images off the internet - some people do seem to share them if you look hard enough. I ordered two SRX 110H2-VA routers off Ebay to scratch this itch (I further scratched this itch with more gear...). I don't need anything particularly fancy, and these units are quite cheap, fairly compact, and lack fans, so they are nice and quiet. There are a lot of basic SRX firewalls available online; as Junos is somewhat consistent across most of the platforms, you will find getting a thing marketed as a "firewall" also lets you learn most of the Juniper platform features for not only firewalling, but switching and routing too from across their portfolio - aside, of course, for those features not supported on this platform or software version. 

By the end of this post, you should be able to create a single router that has 8 virtual routers configured on it with a fairly complex, but easily understood, topology. 

Read on for some ideas... 

Poorly Documented Feature: Canned Responses in Delegated Accounts (Gmail)

It's no secret. We love Gmail. However, sometimes, there are features that don't get used much that are absolute "killer" features - but it turns out they're not always well documented.

A common scenario is creating generic "role based" accounts that receive large volumes of mail, and to then delegate access to this mailbox to several individuals to deal with the responses.

Of course, a lot of incoming emails means a lot of outgoing responses (often the exact same thing hundreds of times), and there's a really handy feature, Canned Responses, in Labs that makes this a pleasure.

Labs Canned Responses.
Thank you Googler Chad P,
bulk email responders LOVE you.

However, if you switch across to a delegated account, shock, horror!
No Labs!
Does that mean no canned responses in delegated accounts? No it does not (phew)...