Cisco ONS 15454 TL1 driver

The cisco_ons_tl1 driver presents a Cisco ONS 15454 multiservice transport platform managed over TL1. It shares the TL1 core with Ciena and Infinera.

Built from documentation, not from a capture

Unlike the Ciena and Infinera drivers, this one was not built from a session capture. It comes from the Cisco ONS SONET TL1 Command Guide R9.1 §21.68 and Oracle’s ONS 15454 TL1 reference. Documented is better than invented, and much weaker than seen on hardware. Treat anything it produces as a starting point, and please open an issue with a real capture if you have access to a node, so it can be corrected.

Cisco calls them ENEs

The elements behind a gateway are ENEs (End NEs) in Cisco’s vocabulary, where Ciena says RNEs. Same idea, different word. The glossary has all three vendors’ terms side by side.

Records are positional

This is the third distinct neighbour grammar of the three drivers, and the one a shared “split on commas, read key=value” parser cannot handle: there are no keywords at all.

< ACT-USER::admin:1::"admin";
< RTRV-MAP-NETWORK:::2;

   ONS-BWI-1001 26-09-12 19:54:13
M  2 COMPLD
   "172.20.222.225,ONS-BWI-1001,15454"
   "172.20.222.224,TID-199,15454"
   "172.20.222.223,TID-452,15454"
   "172.20.222.222,TID-596,15454"
   "172.20.222.221,TID-933,15454"
;

Each record is "<IPADDR>,<NODENAME>,<PRODUCT>".

NODENAME is the TID. PRODUCT is the platform type, and this is the only TL1 vendor of the three that hands a client a real model per element instead of leaving it to copy the gateway’s.

The gateway lists itself first. The other two vendors do not. A client that does not drop its own record will reconcile the gateway as an element behind itself.

UNKNOWN is not a model

The vendor documentation notes PRODUCT comes back as UNKNOWN for a node running a different software version. Every seventh element is emitted that way deliberately:

   "172.20.222.219,TID-338,UNKNOWN"

A client that stores UNKNOWN as a device model has a bug, and this is how it gets caught. A gateway with fewer than seven ENEs will not show one, so generate a few before looking.

Commands

Command	Behaviour
ACT-USER::user:ctag::pass;	In-band login; DENY PLNA before it succeeds
RTRV-MAP-NETWORK	The gateway and the ENEs behind it, positional records
RTRV-EQPT	Shelf inventory, streamed zero-copy; routed by TID
RTRV-ALM-ALL	Active alarms
RTRV-COND-ALL	Standing conditions
RTRV-SW-VER	Software version

Any other verb after login returns DENY with ICNV. The prompt is <, as on Ciena.

Generating Cisco ONS devices

./bin/rcfg-sim-gen -count 2 -ip-count 1 -devices-per-ip 2 \
  -ip-base 127.0.0.1 -port-start 22410 \
  -distribution "cisco-ons15454-tl1:100" \
  -output-dir /tmp/ons -manifest /tmp/ons/manifest.csv

Each gateway fronts 3 to 8 ENEs. Manifest rows carry vendor=Cisco, template=cisco_ons_tl1 — note that cisco_ons_tl1 is a different driver from cisco_ios, and both can appear in one fleet.

See worked examples for full sessions.