What will you get out of this : An introduction to packet walk and hardware components inside of a Juniper MX router
I always wanted to write about packet walks, they are really interesting and we will get to know what happens in side of the hardware world. Starting with Juniper MX series, we will examine packet walks inside of a Juniper MX box
First things first, lets define few things
All the line-cards which gets inserted into the system are of type MPC/DPC/FPC , although generic name will always be FPC
MPC -> Modular PIC Concentrator # This is of interest to us, this is based on TRIO chipset
DPC-> Dense PIC Concentrator
FPC -> Flexible PIC Concentrator
labrouter> show chassis hardware detail | match MPC
FPC 1 MPC4E 3D 32XGE
CPU HMPC PMB 2Glabrouter> show chassis fabric fpcs | match "pfe|fpc"
Fabric management FPC state:
FPC 1
PFE #0
PFE #1
Then comes the point of SCB (Switch Control Board), well once you have all the line cards populated into the system, you need to have a backplane something like a backbone which can glue all the line cards communications together, thats where SCB comes into play.
