Today I had some issues when working on a SRX650. We had to replace the Services and Routing Engine a few days ago. When I was supposed to get the cluster back online I got the following error message when trying to run a few of the commands on the device:
Could not connect to node1 : No route to host
I got this error when typing show interface ge-0/0/2. I also entered the command on the node1 so I felt it was a bit strange that node1 could not connect to node1.
The firewall was also saying that it was in a hold mode
{hold:node1}
So it was not showing as secondary or primary. It was keeping this status all the time and didn’t try to go to any other modes while the issue was occuring.
The reason for my issues was that I had not deleted all the default config from the new Service and Routing engine card that we got. My config was not correct for all the cluster ports since some of the ports in the cluster is dedicated to cluster services (on the SRX650 it is ge-0/0/0 (fxp0) and ge-0/0/0 (control plane)). These ports are not to be configured as network ports and that is the reason for my issues. When I deleted the config and set a default root authentication password everything was connected. When I did a commit from the primary node the config was correct on both devices and everything connected succesfully.
During my search on the internet I read that some people also forgot to set the reth-count and got the same error. The command to set the number of reth interfaces is:
set chassis cluster reth-count 4
A great source for more information is the following chapter of the book “Juniper SRX Series” written by Brad Woodberg and Rob Cameron.
http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001633/ch07.html#activating_juniper_services_redundancy
Networks and rants 