(2) Routing principles – BSCI selfstudy

Okay. I will try and document some information regarding my study to attain the BSCI (Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks) exam.

This is by many considered the hardest exam on the CCNP track (1 of 4 exams). I will tackle this one first, and then continue forward to the other exams knowing they will be easier.

At the moment, I am on the second chapter of the self-study guide from cisco press. There is alot of lab work involved in the CCNP track with topology thats more complex than what I saw on the CCNA level. Also, I have to test out alot more concepts in the lab to make sure I understand it. This might just be me, I dont know.

Anyways. Been doing labs about Classless routing protocols, and how they send and receive information.

I got a good link from a guy on techexams.net, its from Cisco’s website, which I really need to use as a tool to fill in the gaps in knowledge, here it is:

Behavior of RIP and IGRP.

Also, Dynamips/Dynagen is a blessing. I am probably going to order some real life hardware no matter what, but with dynamips, you can have a full featured lab on your computer. Its awesome. Only thing I take issue with, is that multiple routers are not as synchronized as real routers. If I run a “debug ip packet” on one router, and ping it from another router, it lists all the pings sequentially on one router like it would on real hardware, but on the receiving router, it doesnt list a debug line per ping, but lists them in bulk or at least not at the same time as I would expect.

Also, there are alot of exceptions and intracacies here. For example, it turns out that the “ip classless” command will be completely ignored when running OSPF or IS-IS.

Okay, back off to work, hope to get some reading done this afternoon.