I am performing some site maintenance in conjunction with a move to a new VPS server. (Thank you Hetzner (some irony may be involved)). Hopefully everything should be reachable, but some minor UI tweaks may occur. Thanks for understanding. /Kim

As im sitting here in the hotel, waiting to leave for the airport, the only thing on my mind is: Wow.. what an amazing week this has been. I have met so many old friends and made a bunch of new ones. All of the Tech Field Day delegates and staff are so bright and friendly that its hard to put into words. We have debated, discussed, thought out loud, shrugged our shoulders and laughed hard.

I am honoured to have been selected as a delegate for Tech Field Day during Cisco Live Europe 2019 in Barcelona! Cisco Live Europe will take place from the 27th of January until Friday 1st. I am really looking forward to this opportunity. There are some really great names among the list of delegates that I hope to be interacting with quite a lot, both during and after the event.

Yesterday I passed the CCNA-W exam. Now onto the next partner certification I need to do before summer. Its called 500-452 ENCWE – Enterprise Networks Core and WAN Essentials and a large part of it involves iWAN, which im not too familiar with. To that effect I have ordered the official Cisco Press iWAN book and downloaded all the presentations I could find on iWAN from CiscoLive365. That should keep me busy for the foreseeable future 🙂

Wednesday the 22nd of February, in a testing center in the middle of London, my journey towards achieving the CCDE certification, finally ended in me passing this beast of an exam. This learning journey was a very different one than either of my CCIE’s. Whereas going for the CCIE meant spending countless hours at the command-line, the CCDE meant spending all of those hours reading and discussing use cases for technologies.

In case you are serious about going for the CCDE certification, I highly recommend you check out my friend Martin Duggan’s new lab(s) on Leanpub. His writing style is very good and its easy to follow along and i look forward to hitting this lab myself. So go ahead and pay the man and get an additional CCDE lab for your studies. Take care! https://leanpub.com/ccdepracticalstudies-practicelab1  

I am fortunate enough, to be able to goto Cisco Live US! again this year. Last year was such an experience, that my hopes are really high for this year as well. I will be arriving on Friday the 8th and leaving on the 15th. Not a long stay this time, but it was what my boss could arrange for. Again this year I will be bringing my better half, so she can experience the city and hopefully we’ll get a few hours of sightseeing in between commitments.

I was fortunate enough to finally pass the CCDE written exam yesterday morning. That begs the question of “Now What?” Well, I will spend a couple of days putting together a study strategy, based on where I am now compared to where I need to be in order to pass the exam. As it looks now, I am probably going for a fall 2016 exam date. That gives me enough time to settle into a new job with everything that entails.

Its time for a change! It was a tough decision, but i’ve decided that I need some new challenges in my professional life. To that effect, i’ve quit my old job and joined a different VAR/SP where I will be working in a skilled team of network engineers. My duties will include maintaining and expanding a growing MPLS network, with all the services one can build on top of such a beast.

I’ve got some important news which I will reveal in the beginning of December! So stay tuned 🙂  

Even though im still in San Diego, Cisco Live! US 2015 is but a memory. But what a memory it is! It being my first time attending a Cisco Live conference, I didn’t really know what to expect. What I was met with, was a conference full of really sharp and nice people. The conference staff was very helpful and polite and really made an impression on me, from the time I first stepped onto the pavement outside San Diego convention center.

This is my current schedule for the Cisco Live US 2015 event. Most are related to my CCDE studies and a few are with technologies and products that im interested in in general. Monday: 08:00 – 09:30 BRKSAN-2101 FCoE for small and mid size enterprises. 10:00 – 12:00 BRKCRS-2031 Enterprise Campus Design: Multilayer Architectures and Design Principles 13:00 – 15:00 BRKARC-2001 Cisco ASR1000 Series routers: System and Solution Architectures 15:30 – 17:00 GENKEY-1001 Cisco Vision Keynote

I will be attending this year’s Cisco Live US in San Diego! This is my first Cisco Live, so I dont really know what to expect. There are alot of great sessions that I want to attend (if they are not already full), and I will be posting my week here when i have my sessions down. If you want to connect for a coffee or a chat, feel free to drop me a mail/tweet, and im sure we can figure something out!

My apology. I have been very absent here as of late. I have been doing some different stuff, which is irrelevant here, but rest assured, i got some posts lined up. The next one on Unified MPLS. I think you will like it, so stay tuned! 🙂 Happy New Year! 🙂  

Woke up to a very nice email today. I have been selected as a Cisco Champion for 2015! – Now i get to see what all the fuzz is about and hopefully be able to contribute something.

I am currently performing a bit of maintenance on the blog (moving host), so there might be some small errors here and there. I apologise for this! – Hopefully everything will be up and running smoothly in a few days time. Thank you for your patience! /KP

I have decided to change my focus quite a bit. I was planning on tackling the IOS-XR exam this year and was preparing for it by going through the blueprint. However another track kept pulling me towards it, and ofcourse thats the CCDE track. I have spent the last 6 years learning how to do something, but so far i havent spent alot of time thinking about why that is.

Some very smart people have created a new website aimed at the career aspects of the tech world. In time the site should prove to be a valuable tool for anyone trying to land a job in the tech industry. Head on over and check it out at: http://thetechinterview.com/

I just had a chance to go ahead and read Mr. Greg Ferro’s ebook called ”Arse First Method of Technical Blogging“. The book is being published by Leanpub (leanpub.com), an independent publisher and the readers will get free updates to the book as they become available. Mr. Ferro is well known from Etherealmind.com as well as the Packet Pushers podcast. The book is all about writing a technical blog. It takes you through some important facets of writing a blog, namely why to blog in the first place and the importance of actually publishing something.

Okay, so its been a while since my last post. Been having some issues to deal with, which has taken quite alot of energy. I am going for the CCNP, starting with the BSCI exam. Ive got the books for it, and started studying. There’s alot of detailed information, and lots of labs to do. Chapter 2 is 40 pages long, and its taken me two days to reach the end of the information in the book, now im starting the labs in the end of the chapter 🙂

I am happy to report that I managed to pass the CCNA exam yesterday. What a relief. Here it is: Hopefully Maibrith passes her exam today as well!! Update: She did pass it!

I just purchased a Rack from Dantrak UK. I need some sort of solution to mount the gear I have and will be getting. I cant have it all lay around the floor. They (Dantrak UK) is basically a reseller of Dantraknet. I went for the 16U version, in case I will need more space in the future it is upgradeable. Here it is:

This is a project. Take it or leave it. Add to it, or discard it. Basically its my space, only working as… MySpace.

I really like this paragraph, because almost everyone wants to imitate google. Why? well, the answer to that questions seems to be what everyone is missing! Google’s solutions were built for scale that basically doesn’t exist outside of a maybe a handful of companies with a trillion dollar valuation. It’s foolish to assume that their solutions are better. They’re just more scalable. But they are actually very feature-poor. There’s a tradeoff there.

I am currently reading Team of Teams, an excellent book! In it, it highlights an interesting fact that I think is very relevant for the networking world and that is the difference between something that is complicated versus something that is complex. There is a distinct difference in that something complicated can be broken down into its building blocks and analysed with a high degree of certainty. Think of a car engine for example.

Just wanted to let you know that Daniel from lostintransit.se is doing a webinar on network design. I will be attending and helping out any way i can. Go here to learn more: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/community_cafe/2015/01/21/network-design-fundamentals-webinar-with-ciscovip-daniel-dib

At the moment I’m going through whitepapers, Cisco Live 365 presentations and IOS XR fundamentals learning about switching fabrics. Its a steep learning curve, but in its own way its quite fascinating. There are a lot of acronyms to be mastered, so later on i will post a list that might serve myself and others when looking at these sort of architectures.

Practical OTV ————- This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v. I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved. A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI. Instead, I wanted to have full multicast running in the SP core in order to gain a full understanding of the packet forwarding and encapsulation.

Wednesday the 22nd of February, in a testing center in the middle of London, my journey towards achieving the CCDE certification, finally ended in me passing this beast of an exam. This learning journey was a very different one than either of my CCIE’s. Whereas going for the CCIE meant spending countless hours at the command-line, the CCDE meant spending all of those hours reading and discussing use cases for technologies.

For a while now, the concept of EVC’s (Ethernet Virtual Circuits) and EFP’s (Ethernet Flow Points), has eluded me. In this short post, i will provide you with a simple example of a couple of EFP’s. In a later post i will discuss the MEF concept of EVC’s. As always, here is the topology i will be using: Its a very simple setup. R1 connects to R2 through its G1 interface and connects to R3 through its G2 interface.

In case you are serious about going for the CCDE certification, I highly recommend you check out my friend Martin Duggan’s new lab(s) on Leanpub. His writing style is very good and its easy to follow along and i look forward to hitting this lab myself. So go ahead and pay the man and get an additional CCDE lab for your studies. Take care! https://leanpub.com/ccdepracticalstudies-practicelab1  

In this post, I will put together a variety of different technologies involved in a real-life DMVPN deployment. This includes things such as the correct tunnel configuration, routing-configuration using BGP as the protocol of choice, as well as NAT toward an upstream provider and front-door VRF’s in order to implement a default-route on both the Hub and the Spokes and last, but not least a newer feature, namely Per-Tunnel QoS using NHRP.

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune of attending Jeremy Filliben’s CCDE Bootcamp. It was a great experience, which I will elaborate on in another post. But one of the technology areas I had a bit of difficult with, was GETVPN. So in this post a I am going to setup a scenario in which a customer has 3 sites, 2 “normal” sites and a Datacenter site. The customer wants to encrypt traffic from Site 1 to Site 2.

I was fortunate enough to finally pass the CCDE written exam yesterday morning. That begs the question of “Now What?” Well, I will spend a couple of days putting together a study strategy, based on where I am now compared to where I need to be in order to pass the exam. As it looks now, I am probably going for a fall 2016 exam date. That gives me enough time to settle into a new job with everything that entails.

This blog post outlines what “MPLS VPNs over mGRE” is all about as well as provide an example of such a configuration. So what is “MPLS VPNs over mGRE”? – Well, basically its taking regular MPLS VPN’s and using it over an IP only core network. Since VPN’s over MPLS is one of the primary drivers for implementing an MPLS network in the first place, using the same functionality over an IP-only core might be very compelling for some not willing/able to run MPLS label switching in the core.

I am preparing for the CCDE written exam, which I have coming up at CLUS. There are so much material to go through, both to read as well as watch CL presentations, it can be a bit overwhelming at times. So if you are thinking about going down this path, learn how to speed-read 🙂 Just under a month until we leave for the US. We are looking very much forward to the break!

This is my current schedule for the Cisco Live US 2015 event. Most are related to my CCDE studies and a few are with technologies and products that im interested in in general. Monday: 08:00 – 09:30 BRKSAN-2101 FCoE for small and mid size enterprises. 10:00 – 12:00 BRKCRS-2031 Enterprise Campus Design: Multilayer Architectures and Design Principles 13:00 – 15:00 BRKARC-2001 Cisco ASR1000 Series routers: System and Solution Architectures 15:30 – 17:00 GENKEY-1001 Cisco Vision Keynote

Just wanted to let you know that Daniel from lostintransit.se is doing a webinar on network design. I will be attending and helping out any way i can. Go here to learn more: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/community_cafe/2015/01/21/network-design-fundamentals-webinar-with-ciscovip-daniel-dib

In this post I would like to highlight a relative new (to me) application of MPLS called Unified MPLS. The goal of Unified MPLS is to separate your network into individual segments of IGP’s in order to keep your core network as simple as possible while still maintaining an end-to-end LSP for regular MPLS applications such as L3 VPN’s. What we are doing is simply to put Route Reflectors into the forwarding path and changing the next-hop’s along the way, essentially stiching together the final LSP.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network. LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection. However another aspect of using LISP involves its tunneling mechanism.

In the process of restudying EIGRP as a protocol, and more specifically as to how it converges, you can’t avoid running into the saying “Remember to bound your queries!”. From a conceptual point of view its fairly easy to understand that the further out you ask for a prefix the longer the convergence process will take. But what really takes place when you have different tools in place to bound the query from taking place?

I have decided to change my focus quite a bit. I was planning on tackling the IOS-XR exam this year and was preparing for it by going through the blueprint. However another track kept pulling me towards it, and ofcourse thats the CCDE track. I have spent the last 6 years learning how to do something, but so far i havent spent alot of time thinking about why that is.

I decided a while back I would spend a bit of time learning about the Cisco ASA firewall. This is the first post surrounding some technologies I have explored during that time. For some of you it might be easy stuff, but for others, including myself, might find it interesting for reference. One of the most used functions of a firewall is to provide NAT functions. The first one of the different modes of NAT i want to illustrate is Static PAT (Port Address Translation).

Practical OTV ————- This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v. I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved. A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI. Instead, I wanted to have full multicast running in the SP core in order to gain a full understanding of the packet forwarding and encapsulation.

By now, VxLAN is becoming the standard way of tunneling in the Datacenter. Using VxLAN, i will show how to use the CSR1Kv to extend your Datacenter L2 reach between sites as well. First off, what is VxLAN? It stands for Virtual Extensible LAN. Basically you have a way of decoupling your vlan’s into a new scheme. You basically map your VLAN into a VNI (Virtual Network Identifier), which in essence makes your VLAN numbering scheme locally significant.

In this post i would like to highlight a couple of “features” of ISIS. More specifically the authentication mechanism used and how it looks in the data plane. I will do this by configuring a couple of routers and configure the 2 authentication types available. I will then look at packet captures taken from the link between them and illustrate how its used by the ISIS process. The 2 types of Authentication are link-level authentication of the Hello messages used to establish an adjacency and the second type is the authentication used to authenticate the LSP’s (Link State Packet) themselves.

Hello folks, Im currently going through the INE DC videos and learning a lot about fabrics and how they work along with a fair bit of UCS information on top of that! Im spending an average of 2.5 hours on weekdays for study and a bit more in the weekends when time permits. I still have no firm commitment to the CCIE DC track, but at some point I need to commit to it and really get behind it.

In this post I would like to give a demonstration of using the Auto-Tunnel Mesh group feature. As you may know, manual MPLS-TE tunnels are first and foremost unidirectional, meaning that if you do them between two PE nodes, you have to do a tunnel in each direction with the local PE node being the headend. Now imagine if your network had 10 PE routers and you wanted to do a full mesh between them, this can become pretty burdensome and error-prone.

In this post, I will put together a variety of different technologies involved in a real-life DMVPN deployment. This includes things such as the correct tunnel configuration, routing-configuration using BGP as the protocol of choice, as well as NAT toward an upstream provider and front-door VRF’s in order to implement a default-route on both the Hub and the Spokes and last, but not least a newer feature, namely Per-Tunnel QoS using NHRP.

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune of attending Jeremy Filliben’s CCDE Bootcamp. It was a great experience, which I will elaborate on in another post. But one of the technology areas I had a bit of difficult with, was GETVPN. So in this post a I am going to setup a scenario in which a customer has 3 sites, 2 “normal” sites and a Datacenter site. The customer wants to encrypt traffic from Site 1 to Site 2.

This blog post outlines what “MPLS VPNs over mGRE” is all about as well as provide an example of such a configuration. So what is “MPLS VPNs over mGRE”? – Well, basically its taking regular MPLS VPN’s and using it over an IP only core network. Since VPN’s over MPLS is one of the primary drivers for implementing an MPLS network in the first place, using the same functionality over an IP-only core might be very compelling for some not willing/able to run MPLS label switching in the core.

In this post I would like to highlight a relative new (to me) application of MPLS called Unified MPLS. The goal of Unified MPLS is to separate your network into individual segments of IGP’s in order to keep your core network as simple as possible while still maintaining an end-to-end LSP for regular MPLS applications such as L3 VPN’s. What we are doing is simply to put Route Reflectors into the forwarding path and changing the next-hop’s along the way, essentially stiching together the final LSP.

In this post id like to provide an example of a fairly new development to EIGRP which is called EIGRP Over The Top (OTP). In all its simplicity it establish an EIGRP multihop adjacency using LISP as the encapsulation method for transport through the WAN network. One of the applications of this would be to avoid relying on the SP in an MPLS L3 VPN. You could simply use the L3 VPN for transport between the interfaces directly connected to the Service Provider and run your own adjacency directly between your CPE routers (without the use of a GRE tunnel, which would be another method to do it)

In this post i will show how and why to use a feature called IPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD). IPv6 prefix delegation is a feature that provides the capability to delegate or hand out IPv6 prefixes to other routers without the need to hardcode these prefixes into the routers. Why would you want to do this? – Well, for one is the administration overhead associated with manual configuration. If the end-customer only cares about the amount of prefixes he or she receives, then it might as well be handed out automatically from a preconfigure pool.

In this post I will be showing you how its possible to use different paths between your PE routers on a per VRF basis. This is very useful if you have customers you want to “steer” away from your normal traffic flow between PE routers. For example, this could be due to certain SLA’s. I will be using the following topology to demonstrate how this can be done: A short walkthrough of the topology is in order.

In this fairly short post, id like to address a topic that came up on IRC (#cciestudy @ freenode.net). Its about how you select a route thats being redistributed into an OSPF NSSA area and comes into the OSPF backbone area 0. For my post i will be using the very simple topology below. Nothing else is necessary to illustrate what is going on. First off, id like to clarify a few things about what takes place when redistributing routes into an NSSA area.

Well, a short update. I managed to pass the CCIE Service Provider lab exam on March 14th. I am quite exhausted from the experience, but very happy 🙂

Its been a long time since my last update. I apologise for this. It wasnt my intention, it just sort of happened. In the meantime I have tried the CCIE SP lab and didnt pass it, so I am still studying for my next attempt which is comming up shortly. Until then I have booked quite a number of rack hours. Hopefully I will learn from some of the mistakes I have identified.

The CSNP on multiaccess networks The CSNP (Complete Sequence Number PDU) on multi-access networks is being sent out on behalf of the DIS (Designated Intermediate System), which acts as the pseudonode representing the multi-access network. Its being used as ISIS’s way of making sure everybody on the multi-access network is up to date. If thats not the case, the node which is missing some routing information can use PSNP (Partial Sequence Number PDU)’s to request the missing information from the DIS.

In this short post i want to try and shed some light on a couple of ISIS timers that had me confused at first. I think i got them down now, but please let me know if i have misunderstood them. The timers in question is “isis retransmit-interval ” and “isis retransmit-throttle-interval “. Both of these commands are only relevant on point-to-point links as no concept of a DIS is present here.

In this post i would like to explain how you can fix a multicast RPF failure using BGP. If you take a look at the topology in figure 1, we have a network running EIGRP as the IGP and where R1 advertises its loopback 0 (1.1.1.1/32). R4 also has a loopback 0 with the 4.4.4.4/32 address. EIGRP adjacencies are running between R1 and R2, R1 and R3, R2 and R3 and finally R3 and R4.

This morning I booked my first go with the CCIE Service Provider lab exam. The battle is in mid November, so I have some time to study. That also means that alot of forthcomming blog posts will be about CCIE SP material. I will try and blog about all the tricky features comming my way and provide plenty of examples. At the moment im very excited and at the same time very humble to have a go at the SP lab exam.

In this post i would like to explain the usage of the “MPLS VPN Per VRF Label” feature. By default, in each VRF, prefixes are assigned a VPN label, used to identify the route within the VRF itself. This label is the only label that is being looked at by the receiving PE router. In theory, you only need a single label to identify the VRF for the destination prefix, and then you can do an IP lookup to further process the packet.

“All that matters, is where you are going” is a favorite quote of mine. With that an update as well as a plan to move forward. I have now finished Narbik’s Volume 2 Service Provider workbook. It took a little while longer than I had planned. This is mainly because i took some time off during the holidays (well, studied less at least 🙂 ). Just today, I finished working on a plan of attack for the next phase of my studies.

I have now finished the Narbik Volume 1 labs. It took about 2,5 weeks to do. Im planning on spending a bit more time on the Volume 2 labs. Maybe about 3-4 weeks. I want to make sure i got all the foundational stuff down before advancing to some more complex labs. Nothing new on the hardware vs. rack rental front just yet. Im still debating on what to do.

In this short piece i would like to show how Frame-Relay PVC bundles work. A PVC bundle is exactly what the name says. Its a bundle of PVC’s, with each PVC handling a certain Precedence, MPLS EXP or DSCP. A requirement for the PVC bundle is that all IP Precedence or DSCP values will be handled by one of the PVC’s, so you need to set the “default” PVC unless

Just wanted to let you know of a good place to go for some IOS-XR training. Head on over to FryGuy’s place: http://www.fryguy.net/2012/11/06/ios-xr-cisco-videos-and-training/

I have recertified by doing the SP written exam. Took me a while, but now its done. My plan is to hit the labs, starting with Narbik’s SP workbook, working my way through that one. That should keep me occupied for quite a while. After that I plan on going to a SP bootcamp at some point in 2013. Which one and where im not sure of yet. It all depends on availability.

In this post i would like to demonstrate the Class-Based Tunnel Selection feature. In class-based tunnel selection, we will select an MPLS TE tunnel based on the incomming Precedence bit in the data. For example, IP Prec 5 goes to TE Tunnel 1, whereas IP Prec 3 goes to TE Tunnel 2. This sort of thing would be very useful for the SP if SLA’s are offered based on the incomming data.

In this post i would like to demonstrate the concept of a well known MPLS TE (Traffic Engineering) feature, known as Fast Reroute. Fast Reroute, as the name implies, is used to create an MPLS network, that has similar convergence properties of SONET/SDH APS of about 50 ms. Obviously, such aggressive convergence times are needed primarily in Service Provider networks or institutions with very high demands. For example financial institutions.

One of the cool things about MPLS is its versatility. In this post i will show how its possible for a service provider to support legacy frame-relay installations without actually having any frame-relay switches. I will establish an MPLS core and show how a customer with three sites, one hub site and two spoke sites, will never even know that the core is running MPLS and not end-to-end frame-relay. The hub site will have a single access-interface with two frame-relay PVC’s, one to each spoke site, where as the spoke sites will only have a connection to the hub site.

I have ordered the first batch of books for the CCIE SP track. They are: Traffic Engineering with MPLS Cisco IOS-XR Fundamentals MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies MPLS Configuration on Cisco IOS Software I was hoping that you could get them all as eBooks, but as it turns out, i can get some of them as eBooks through Kindle and some through Cisco Press PDF’s and others i could only get as hard copies.

The cat is out of the bag. I am going for my 2nd CCIE. This time its in the Service Provider track. For a while i have felt something missing. And what is missing is a clear cut direction on what i want to learn more about in my professional life. I had a choice to make. Should i simply pick out areas of interest in the networking space and learn what i could about those or should i commit to a certain CCIE track and follow that path of learning.

There’s news on INE’s Service Provider material. Updated workbooks for the SPv3 will be arriving “soon”. Hopefully that means within a month or two. If you are interested, you can read more and even get a peak into a sample lab. Head on over to INE here: Link

Below are my findings regarding CAR. Please be advised that this is work in progress. CAR is the ancient way of doing policing. It is not configured using any of the new and fancy MQC style configuration. It is an interface-based command set. CAR is a policer, and as such it is meant to drop packets at some point. CAR can be multi-level, meaning you can police according to different specifications.

Update: By most examinations, this seems to be a bug. A clever guy at the Cisco support forums might offer the reason why this happens. Thanks to everyone for clearing this up! (https://supportforums.cisco.com/message/3519430) I was trying someting out the other day concerning EIGRP when i ran into an issue i still cant explain, so i would like to put it out there for scrutiny. It concerns the “variance” command in EIGRP used for unequal-cost load-balancing.

I have finally decided to clean up my Routing & Switching notes and more importantly moving them from Microsoft OneNote to Microsoft Word. I know, I know, its still Microsoft, but even though OneNote has been okay for my needs, the lack of the program for Mac OS is annoying the crap out of me. Going through this process is going to be interesting, as i have found myself verifying things and trying out the technologies again.

In this post i will shed some light on some spanning-tree info that has been floating around. But also an explanation why i choose a non-obvious answer to an IPexpert question. Specifically 2 things. The first one is the selection of ports and what _exactly_ selects the root port. The second thing is selection of a designated bridge and why the typical phrasing of a question might also be more complex than what you expect.

Lately theres been some fuzz in the corners about the need for NAT in the new world order of IPv6. I think its a poor design choice and ill give my reason below. One of the reasons why people seem to feel like they need NAT, is accessibility to IPv4 only content. While i agree this is certainly a concern, it is being rendered less and less important each day as more content providers run dual-stack (or some other form of proxying).

It seems like every day, there are some vulnerability or crack announced on the geek news-outlets. For some reason, the recent publication of an exploit of a flaw in the SSL/TLS implementation in some versions, made me extra curious and it made me think a little harder about this whole security business. My basic premise for thinking about security, is that disclosure is good. Disclosure in a morally fashion is even better.

Flex Links, otherwise known as the devil for your L2 network. In all fairness, lets actually figure out what this feature is used for. The most important thing you need to know is the fact that Flex links disable your spanning-tree process. By that very sentence alone, you should be concerned. I like to call Flex links, backup-links instead, because that is in fact what it is. If you have two uplink ports to your upstream switch as seen in our topology below, you might want to have one link in a standby mode, ready to take over immediately.

I just watched this great lecture from INE on multicast. Well worth sharing:

Using L2 tunnel protocol version 3, you can accomplish what so many scientists are working on. A Wormhole! Granted, this wormhole is just through your L3 network, so it might not raise as many eyebrows, but its still a nifty tool in your toolbox. This will be a fairly short post, but it does give you the ability to see how this works and what you can use it for.

In this small post i want to clarify the use of the “ip verify” command. There has been some confusion on the usage of this command, especially in conjunction with the access-list parameter. I would like to clarify this here. The command is basically a way to mitigate spoofing. You want to make sure that the source of the packet is received from the correct path, meaning interface. First off the topology:

Hi everyone, I am happy to announce that this week i passed the R&S CCIE lab exam. CCIE #29189. Its been a long journey for me. Working full time, not taking any dedicated time off work to do so, has been challenging. Its been a journey which has challenged me in every way, but also one that has been straining every part of my life. I have given up alot to get to this point.

In this article i will try and setup a very simple example using Cisco IOS IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). As before, a simple topology consisting of 3 routers will suffice. They are configured as follows: Topology for IPS example. R1 will act as our source host. From this machine i will simulate an attacker trying to gain access to R3 through R2. This means R2 will be the device where we will be configuring the IPS functionality.

I am going through the detailed blueprint, one item at a time and verifying that there are no surprises. Especially IP services and security is something i havent paid enough attention to in the past. Anyways, there are lots of items on that darn list and going through them all takes alot of time. I have also been messing around with multicast and using BGP for RPF verification. One thing that i got down was from reading a passage in Developing IP multicast networks, namely that the network advertised in BGP is for the SOURCE only.

Link optimization on frame-relay. Using frame-relay, bandwidth is especially a concern. It is possible to optimize this bandwidth in several ways. I will concentrate this post about compression and fragmentation. First off, with compression on frame-relay there several methods of accomplishing this. You can have payload compression, tcp compression and RTP compression. How they are each configured depends on your interface. I will show how all of these are configured using a mix of point-to-point and multipoint interfaces.

As promised, here is a couple of photos of the final layout.   Total Layout   More detailed view   Thats all there is to it 🙂  

So I modified the previous layout a bit. The concern i voiced about the 3640 was enough to make me figure out a way to have that one as the bottom piece of equipment. This is what i ended up with: It worked out pretty well. All the cables were long enough to accomplish the design above. On top of it all i have my remote power switch so i can power it all on/off remotely.

I need to start cabling all of this gear into place. I have made a layout which i think i will try out. The only thing that concerns me is the weight of the 3640 router. Its a heavy baby. As you can see i have most of the routers on top, with only 3 backbone routers in the lower section (16U section). I need to have the Frame Switch pretty centralized as my cables for this are not very long.

I have received the rest of my routers (1841s), I have also received the memory and flash upgrades for them all (256meg memory and 64mb flash). The guy who sold them to me was very helpful and it turned out he had the cables that i needed as well (some Smart-serial to Smart-serial, as well as some DB60 ones). Right now im doing some configuration for my access-server as well as checking out that all the memory and flash modules work as expected.

So i have decided to extend my rack functionality. I have the nessecary switching capacity, but what i need are the “correct” routers. Because of that, i have so far purchased 4x 1841 + a 2811. I still need 3 more before its in order. On top of that i need more memory and flash for them all. I already have 3 backbone routers (2600 series). Its a costly solution, but the only one that wont give me any more trouble where i spend time figuring out where the issue is at, if its with my solution or the underlying hardware/software.

NTP is one of those things that really keeps messing with my head. To break it down, what does it do for us? Simple. It provides the correct time of the day. How does it accomplish this? Now this is where it gets interesting. Lets assume that you have a router which is already synchronized. Since it is already synchronized with a time source, it itself can become a time source.

I want to point everyones attention at this blog post made by Marko over at IPX. Its a good read and i think you will all enjoy it!   http://blog.ipexpert.com/2011/01/19/old-ccie-myths-vlan-1/

Welcome to 2011. I hope that you have had time to enjoy the holidays and all the festivities that come with it. Personally i have been doing alot of work stuff. Moving data centers is no small task when the customers want constant uptime. Of course for some customers this couldnt be done as they dont have fully redundant systems to switch over to. However a large part could be done very fast, but they all needed to be done at night and preferably during the weekends.

The month of December has been crazy for me. A ton of work related stuff has been going on. Our HQ move has taken its toll on everybody. Ive been working through every weekend, putting in some 20 odd hours on some days. Yesterday we pulled the last plug from the old location, having switched over all of our BGP peerings to the new datacenter. Fortunally this went off without a hitch.

My understanding of IRB: I did another Volume 1 lab yesterday. Again i hit my head against the infamous IRB feature. IRB stands for Integrated Routing and Bridging. Below is my understanding of the technology. I could be very wrong about this, so please correct me if i state something completely incorrect. Bridging is switching. Our standard routers dont normally do any bridging, but they can. Basically you can bridge between two interfaces, which on a router, is routed interfaces.

Its been just over two weeks since my lab attempt. I have basically done no studying at all during that time. Time has come to get back in the game. I do have alot of work to do in the near future, but i will still try and do all the studying i can squeeze in. IPexpert volume 3 labs is comming up and im anxious to see how they are.

I had a bit of spare time yesterday, and i stumbled across a great video walkthrough of the Cisco documenation by Internetwork Expert (INE), and i thought i would share it with you in case you hadnt already discovered it: http://www.ine.com/samples/mastering_the_doc-cd.htm   I hope you will enjoy it. I certainly did.

First shot = Failure. So i had my first lab attempt on tuesday the 2nd of November. Boy was it hard 🙂 Unfortunally i didnt pass this time around. I did very well in the troubleshooting part, but the configuration part, got the best of me. There are several reasons for this, but among the top ones is the fact that i didnt follow my own strategy. My strategy was to do what ive done many many times before.

This was all written yesterday 🙂 Airport fun! So right now (im sitting in London Stansted Airport after having attended the last of Narbiks bootcamp. Its going to be good to get home to the girlfriend and my puppy. He had a guest with him this time around. Rolf Schärer. The guy is a tripple CCIE (R&S, SP and Storage). Very knowledgeable and nice guy. If you have business in and around the Swiss nation, he is a safe bet when it comes to Cisco technologies.

As you may have noticed from my inexcusable lack of posts, ive been very busy. I have been finishing up IPexperts volume 1 workbooks and now going through volume 2. Still lots of interesting details to learn about. I have also managed to get most of my video-on-demand material onto my iPad so i have easier access to it. Next week (tuesday until saturday) ill be in the UK for Narbik’s bootcamp.

I wanted to point your attention to gns3vault.com. Alot of students use GNS3 (front end for dynamips) to do alot of their lab work. Rene Molenaar created this site, which is basically a site with free labs that you can download and practice on. A great idea! Go there and give him a shoutout and maybe contribute with some labs.

Im back from vacation. I can now with convinction state that hotels in Spain are not up to par with other places. I have been to Spain twice now, and they NEVER have an internet connection in the rooms. You had Wifi in the lobby, 2€ for an hour, and it barely worked. Hence i could not work on my home rack at all. This meant i spent only a few hours to watch Video On Demand.

Awesome. Got alot of EEM ground covered today. Seems like a very powerful scripting engine that stands out, by having the ability to be triggered under certain circumstances. Lets check out an example using the topology below: EEM Topology R1 is connected to an ethernet segment. Imagine that on this ethernet segment we have multiple things running. In order to test things out, imagine that R2 is our NMS.

I have started doing IPexpert Vol 1. technology labs. They are pretty challeging. They make you think out of the box. Almost none of it is vanilla configuration. I dont know how closely these labs reflect the real one. Ofcourse these are Vol. 1 labs, but what i mean by it, is especially the wording. Maybe its just me. If you get a task stating you have to do something, what i find hard, is to allow myself to implement any special solution that comes to mind, even though it seems radical.

Woke up early this morning to get a head-start on the Video-on-Demand courses. I do it by looking at the PDF’s thats covered on each configuration section, and try and replicate the topology as well as solving all the tasks. Afterwards i follow along the video and check out if my solution matches, and notes down if theres other ways to perform the same thing. Its very good training to do it that way i think.

Update 11-08-2010: I can now create RMON alarms and events. It seems the command set for RMON is pretty limited. Not much around the net as to how deep to go into this. Hope its enough. I just looked over the detailed blueprint which is authored by cisco. It had checkmarks, which i used to mark down things i knew i could configure, as well as things i really need more training in.

I have vented about this topic before and will do so once again. I am doing this because i believe its very important. Students who are studying for Cisco exams or engineers who are trying to lab up a technology before deploying it, have found Dynamips and used Cisco hardware very useful in the past. However, with the new exam requirements and the new licensing methods for IOS, these tools will not be available to you in the future.

Troubleshooting. An artform in itself. I have been doing trouble-shooting labs for the last week and its not going the way i want it to. In all fairness, its very good practice! having all the components in one lab, with all sorts of technologies interconnected really makes life interesting. The most valuable thing i have learned so far, is to calm down and not rush into a “maybe-this-works” sort of solution.

I am in the process of figuring out how to get to another bootcamp (Narbik). Unfortunally alot of classes in Europe have been cancelled due to lack of students. This pretty much leaves me with going to the US at some point. I want the date/bootcamp confirmed before i order plane tickets/hotel and whatnot. Hopefully this can be worked out soon. I have finished all of the labs in both volume 1 and volume 2.

A a couple links that you guys mind find good: [http://prakashkalsaria.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/pe-ce.jpg ][1] http://lovemytool.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc First one is a great overview of some BGP options. The second one is a page with a list of videos of Sharkfest. All things wireshark it would appear 🙂

My apologies for the huge lack of content lately. I have been insanely busy with work along with doing lots of labs. Especially IPv6 labs was challenging. I have done 50% of a blog post about my trials with this beast. The day before yesterday i started on one of my worst enemies, namely Multicasting. Even the very name of it scares me. It shouldnt be like that, so im working on facing my fears.

I wanted to take some time to write up something about the cost of doing the CCIE track. This is prompted by some recent events in the CCIE training community and some discussion on twitter about studying in an economic downturn. Now, there are a couple of different ways of thinking about this. I recognize them all, and see their validity, but i will pitch in on my thoughts about it.

New technology i just learned about! Its called PIPQ, and stands for PVC Interface Priority Queueing. As the name implies, its a Queueing method, and its only for frame-relay. It basically functions in the same way as a PQ scheme, in that it has 4 queues, high, medium, normal and low. Where it differs is that instead of putting packets into each queue, you “put PVC’s” into each queue, or rather, you designate into which queue this specific PVC should belong to.

Just finished a VERY busy day at work. Virus attack at a customer site + a complete FTP server change. Anyways. I wanted to let you know of a book i just started which i think will come in handy in the lab. Its Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols. A Cisco Press book. So far ive just read the introductory chapters as well as a primer on RIP. I think its a book i will read almost cover to cover (skipping IGRP and ISIS chapters) since it might provide some usefull insight into border-line

This just in, well not really, as the news is a couple of days old. The dreaded OEQ for the R&S lab exam is now a thing of the past. The news created alot of buzz on the forums, twitter and facebook. It would seem that alot of people have really been fearing these questions. My opinion on these, as its always been, is that it was a flaky idea to begin with.

[polldaddy poll=3121673]

So im almost ready to release my first version of my flashcards. I had hoped to reach 200 questions by today, but i havent been able to manage that yet. Lots of real life stuff has been happening today (completely cleaning two cars as well as putting summer-tires on them). I will be releasing my Mnemosyne database, which includes alot of the things i have a hard time remembering. I hope that others will some use for them as well!

I have a few minutes this morning that i want to use to clarify a special BGP feature which i had misunderstood until a few days ago. This has to do with the aggregate-address that you use to create a summary address. One of its many options includes the “advertise-map” parameter. Previously i was under the impression that it functioned in the same manner as the advertise-map thats used when selecting what routes to advertise based on conditions (exist and non-exist maps).

Long time since last post. There are reasons for that. First of is labs. Ive been doing quite alot of labs. I finished Narbik’s Vol 1 workbook. All good stuff, and I learned alot of material that was not covered in the written blueprint. Alot of emphasis on IP SLA, which i really like. It provides a really good tool in your networking toolbox. Second is that work has taken its toll.

In my continued quest through BGP i ran into a couple of things which i wanted to share my thoughts about. All of them has to do with a non-direct peering between BGP peers. Originally the BGP protocol was designed to be run between directly connected routers. Then came along these busy times where we might want to have two connections, for redundancy and load-balacing purposes. We also want to have a single peering only.

I want to point your attention to a great article right here: ardenpackeer.com, good stuff, deffinately worth the read. I am looking this up today, as i ran into it last night doing more BGP labs. Again, just to re-iterate. The feature gives you the ability of taking a network, thats advertised by a certain source, and inject a more specific route of this network into the BGP table (and then to the routing table).

I wanted to share a very interesting tidbit i figured out the hard way. Again, its about NSSA areas in OSPF. When redistributing a route into an NSSA area, how is the forwarding address chosen? Some say the lowest IP address of any loopback interfaces thats advertised into the NSSA area. Others say the highest. Which one is correct? The answer is suprisingly: Neither! The question then becomes, how DOES it choose it?

I havent been very good at updating my blog lately. The reason for this is that i have been really focused on doing labs. Im still doing Narbik’s labs. They are great! They really make you think about what you are doing and contains the nasty 007 tricks 🙂 There’s also been some work pressure going on. Especially one client needed a pretty big network change this week, so we had to pull an all nighter.

I wanted to give a status update on my study progress as it stands on February 28th 2010. At the moment im still hitting Narbik labs. There are alot of good ones, and i havent even hit the troubleshooting labs yet. This weekend has completely wasted though. Mainly because of my birthday this friday, and moving my girlfriend back in with me (we had two appartments for her to goto school in a different city).

First off, thanks to the two sites below, i finally learned what this beast was about. Thanks guys! Human Modem CCIE Candidate I got around to play with fallback bridging yesterday. I want to summarize its important points here. To understand it in the first place, it helps to give some information on why its needed. In using routed protocols, such as IP, we have the possibility of going across VLAN boundaries by using ip routing between vlan interfaces.

I had a very long day at work yesterday, but still felt like doing a lab when i got home. My next lab was about fallback-bridging. Yet another topic i know nothing about 🙂 So today/tonights plan calls for figuring this technology out. It doesnt seem overly complicated to configure, but its more of a task to understand the technology. I’ve collected a few resources that im going to go through tonight, here they are:

Yesterday I passed the CCNA-W exam. Now onto the next partner certification I need to do before summer. Its called 500-452 ENCWE – Enterprise Networks Core and WAN Essentials and a large part of it involves iWAN, which im not too familiar with. To that effect I have ordered the official Cisco Press iWAN book and downloaded all the presentations I could find on iWAN from CiscoLive365. That should keep me busy for the foreseeable future 🙂

I’ve had a little time readjusting after my exam and I’ve given some thought on what to keep me busy next. Basically I have 3 projects to keep me busy for the next foreseeable future. 1) CCNA-Wireless My boss came to me a week ago and tasked me with this. He was very humble about it, which was amusing. I will be allocated some time from my normal work projects to study for the exam, which is really helpful.

This week, I am attending Cisco’s EMEAR Enterprise Networking PVT in Amsterdam and I wanted to highlight some key takeaways. Cisco is really doubling down on getting its software strategy in place. Everything, and I mean everything gets a mention in regards to what sort of software is enabling it (DNA Center/SD-Access/SD-WAN etc.). First, ofcourse is the SD-WAN strategy. Cisco confirmed that most of the development of code is for the XE based vEdges to get them up and running.

In just 3 days time I will be leaving for Cisco Live 2019 in Barcelona. Im thinking about what sort of event it will be and what to expect in term of announcements. Especially one thought keeps reappearing and thats the thought of the transformation of Cisco. It is no longer a company with a future in just selling hardware. It itself has been disrupted by the emergence of “everything software” and merchant silicon.

Small update. I was fortunate enough to be selected as a Cisco Champion for 2019. Looking forward to alot of good information and cooperation from the program! 🙂  

Practical OTV ————- This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v. I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved. A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI. Instead, I wanted to have full multicast running in the SP core in order to gain a full understanding of the packet forwarding and encapsulation.

In this post i would like to highlight a couple of “features” of ISIS. More specifically the authentication mechanism used and how it looks in the data plane. I will do this by configuring a couple of routers and configure the 2 authentication types available. I will then look at packet captures taken from the link between them and illustrate how its used by the ISIS process. The 2 types of Authentication are link-level authentication of the Hello messages used to establish an adjacency and the second type is the authentication used to authenticate the LSP’s (Link State Packet) themselves.

Hello folks, Im currently going through the INE DC videos and learning a lot about fabrics and how they work along with a fair bit of UCS information on top of that! Im spending an average of 2.5 hours on weekdays for study and a bit more in the weekends when time permits. I still have no firm commitment to the CCIE DC track, but at some point I need to commit to it and really get behind it.

For a while now, the concept of EVC’s (Ethernet Virtual Circuits) and EFP’s (Ethernet Flow Points), has eluded me. In this short post, i will provide you with a simple example of a couple of EFP’s. In a later post i will discuss the MEF concept of EVC’s. As always, here is the topology i will be using: Its a very simple setup. R1 connects to R2 through its G1 interface and connects to R3 through its G2 interface.

By now, VxLAN is becoming the standard way of tunneling in the Datacenter. Using VxLAN, i will show how to use the CSR1Kv to extend your Datacenter L2 reach between sites as well. First off, what is VxLAN? It stands for Virtual Extensible LAN. Basically you have a way of decoupling your vlan’s into a new scheme. You basically map your VLAN into a VNI (Virtual Network Identifier), which in essence makes your VLAN numbering scheme locally significant.

For a while now, the concept of EVC’s (Ethernet Virtual Circuits) and EFP’s (Ethernet Flow Points), has eluded me. In this short post, i will provide you with a simple example of a couple of EFP’s. In a later post i will discuss the MEF concept of EVC’s. As always, here is the topology i will be using: Its a very simple setup. R1 connects to R2 through its G1 interface and connects to R3 through its G2 interface.

I own alot of books. By books, i mean those paper things, that takes up alot of space and for which we chop down trees. Recently, i have been shifting my reading onto my iPad. Its easy to carry around, it holds multiple books and pdf files. On top of that, i find its a great reading device. The fonts are rendered fantastically and they are easy on the eyes to read.

I like sunny weather when its moderate, but temperatures in the 25+ Celcius range is a bit too much for me. Especially when I need to spend time in front of my computer. I will need some kind of cooling solution this summer for sure. My idea was a fan with a timer on it for falling asleep, but not having it turned on all night (the draft will make you sick).

For a while now, the concept of EVC’s (Ethernet Virtual Circuits) and EFP’s (Ethernet Flow Points), has eluded me. In this short post, i will provide you with a simple example of a couple of EFP’s. In a later post i will discuss the MEF concept of EVC’s. As always, here is the topology i will be using: Its a very simple setup. R1 connects to R2 through its G1 interface and connects to R3 through its G2 interface.

I was checking piratgruppen.org (A place in favor of sharing things online) the other day, and found that a new site, rettighedsportalen.dk had been started by a former spokesperson of piratgruppen.org. The site aims to shed some light on immaterial “rights”. This is a good idea and I for one welcome it. One of the first articles that was posted was from the chairman of KODA, a rightsholder organisation for composers in Denmark.

This is cool, a p2p program based on real life trust. Alliance is a program that everyone has seen before, but with a twist. Instead of searching everybody and their uncle’s stash of bits, you only search a much smaller circle of people whom you already trust. This makes it virtually impossible for the RIAA/MPAA/to catch you in the act (if you were doing something illegal with the technology in the first place).

But it is still the number of peers The Piratebay had sometime during the past week.A peer is defined in the bittorrent world as one who connects to download/upload some part of a file. The number 12.000.000 is also about twice the amount of people living in Denmark at the moment. Just think about what that means for a second. It means that a website to share information has twice as many people using it as a small country has inhabitants.

But it was a close one: “The vote was close, with 314 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) voting in favor of an amendment to scrap what many consider draconian and disproportionate measures to protect copyright over the internet, and 297 voting against the amendment.“ That means there are still 297 souls out there, that really dont get that Internet access is vital for any person living in this day an age.

Filesharing, as I define it, is a way for people to share files with one and another. Filesharing programs, are programs that enable people to do so. The programming instructions which perform the transfer of bits from one computer to another is a technology. Slicing, as I define it, is a way for people to slice something, ie. a loaf of bread. A knife, is a tool that enable people to slice bread.

How do you explain how Bittorrent works to people who have never heard of Bittorrent before? I actually find it quite hard to explain the fundamentals of it.

I read on Slashdot today, that a “Jack Thompson“, walked out of court, apparently because he was being disbarred for 10 years. I couldnt quite remember who he was, but then it dawned upon me, he’s the smock thats been trying to ban what he thinks are violent games, because he’s of the opinion they are bad for society. He didnt think the court had the authority to hand him his ass, so he walked out of there.

I was checking piratgruppen.org (A place in favor of sharing things online) the other day, and found that a new site, rettighedsportalen.dk had been started by a former spokesperson of piratgruppen.org. The site aims to shed some light on immaterial “rights”. This is a good idea and I for one welcome it. One of the first articles that was posted was from the chairman of KODA, a rightsholder organisation for composers in Denmark.

This is cool, a p2p program based on real life trust. Alliance is a program that everyone has seen before, but with a twist. Instead of searching everybody and their uncle’s stash of bits, you only search a much smaller circle of people whom you already trust. This makes it virtually impossible for the RIAA/MPAA/to catch you in the act (if you were doing something illegal with the technology in the first place).

But it is still the number of peers The Piratebay had sometime during the past week.A peer is defined in the bittorrent world as one who connects to download/upload some part of a file. The number 12.000.000 is also about twice the amount of people living in Denmark at the moment. Just think about what that means for a second. It means that a website to share information has twice as many people using it as a small country has inhabitants.

But it was a close one: “The vote was close, with 314 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) voting in favor of an amendment to scrap what many consider draconian and disproportionate measures to protect copyright over the internet, and 297 voting against the amendment.“ That means there are still 297 souls out there, that really dont get that Internet access is vital for any person living in this day an age.

Filesharing, as I define it, is a way for people to share files with one and another. Filesharing programs, are programs that enable people to do so. The programming instructions which perform the transfer of bits from one computer to another is a technology. Slicing, as I define it, is a way for people to slice something, ie. a loaf of bread. A knife, is a tool that enable people to slice bread.

This is what the white house looked like during Earth Hour: Earth Hour – An hour where alot of citizens around the world turned of their lights to save electricity, and thereby showing their concern for the environment. I participated, did you?

Please sign this petition if you are against the European copyright term being extended. It is bad enough as it is, so please take action. And also, please remember to support EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), with donations, advocating and educating people about the importance of online freedom. Thanks Link

A link on Digg pointed towards a YouTube video explaining Net neutrality. This is an important subject, not just in the US, but everywhere. The Telco’s might own the pipes, but they shouldnt get to decide what gets to flow through them. Check it out.  

Watched a short video clip on Digg today, about a guy who knew he only had a few months to live, and yet he choose to make the most of it. This should really be a lesson to alot of us, to enjoy life!! Link

How will peace ever be established between the large parts of the muslim world and the west, when young kids are being taught to kill for depicting a god in a way you dont like? Well, thats exactly what a children show stipulated a few days ago, regarding the now infamous Muhammed drawings. A show for kids by the palestinian channel al Aqsa, had a pink bunny say, that if the artist behind the drawings ever did such a thing again, he must certainly die!

Dont know if you heard, but at this very moment Denmark is experiencing alot of riots in the streets of major cities. Once again, pictures of the prophet Muhammed, are being displayed on major newspapers. This time not as a simple journalistic interest, but because members of the Islamic community has put forth deaththreats on the person is behind them. Police have judged the threats as to be very real. As a support, and to get this public knowledge, major Danish newspapers have all re-printed the pictures.

New Server: So I just completed a purchase off eBay for a new server for my lab purposes. For a while now I’ve been limited to 32Gb of memory on my old ESXi server, which is really more like 20Gb when my regular servers have had their share. Running a combination of different types of devices, each taking at least 4Gb of memory, doesn’t leave much room for larger labs.

I’ve had a little time readjusting after my exam and I’ve given some thought on what to keep me busy next. Basically I have 3 projects to keep me busy for the next foreseeable future. 1) CCNA-Wireless My boss came to me a week ago and tasked me with this. He was very humble about it, which was amusing. I will be allocated some time from my normal work projects to study for the exam, which is really helpful.

I’ve had a little time readjusting after my exam and I’ve given some thought on what to keep me busy next. Basically I have 3 projects to keep me busy for the next foreseeable future. 1) CCNA-Wireless My boss came to me a week ago and tasked me with this. He was very humble about it, which was amusing. I will be allocated some time from my normal work projects to study for the exam, which is really helpful.

Practical OTV ————- This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v. I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved. A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI. Instead, I wanted to have full multicast running in the SP core in order to gain a full understanding of the packet forwarding and encapsulation.

By now, VxLAN is becoming the standard way of tunneling in the Datacenter. Using VxLAN, i will show how to use the CSR1Kv to extend your Datacenter L2 reach between sites as well. First off, what is VxLAN? It stands for Virtual Extensible LAN. Basically you have a way of decoupling your vlan’s into a new scheme. You basically map your VLAN into a VNI (Virtual Network Identifier), which in essence makes your VLAN numbering scheme locally significant.

In this post i would like to highlight a couple of “features” of ISIS. More specifically the authentication mechanism used and how it looks in the data plane. I will do this by configuring a couple of routers and configure the 2 authentication types available. I will then look at packet captures taken from the link between them and illustrate how its used by the ISIS process. The 2 types of Authentication are link-level authentication of the Hello messages used to establish an adjacency and the second type is the authentication used to authenticate the LSP’s (Link State Packet) themselves.

In this post I would like to highlight a relative new (to me) application of MPLS called Unified MPLS. The goal of Unified MPLS is to separate your network into individual segments of IGP’s in order to keep your core network as simple as possible while still maintaining an end-to-end LSP for regular MPLS applications such as L3 VPN’s. What we are doing is simply to put Route Reflectors into the forwarding path and changing the next-hop’s along the way, essentially stiching together the final LSP.

In this post id like to provide an example of a fairly new development to EIGRP which is called EIGRP Over The Top (OTP). In all its simplicity it establish an EIGRP multihop adjacency using LISP as the encapsulation method for transport through the WAN network. One of the applications of this would be to avoid relying on the SP in an MPLS L3 VPN. You could simply use the L3 VPN for transport between the interfaces directly connected to the Service Provider and run your own adjacency directly between your CPE routers (without the use of a GRE tunnel, which would be another method to do it)

In this post i will show how and why to use a feature called IPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD). IPv6 prefix delegation is a feature that provides the capability to delegate or hand out IPv6 prefixes to other routers without the need to hardcode these prefixes into the routers. Why would you want to do this? – Well, for one is the administration overhead associated with manual configuration. If the end-customer only cares about the amount of prefixes he or she receives, then it might as well be handed out automatically from a preconfigure pool.

In this post I will be showing you how its possible to use different paths between your PE routers on a per VRF basis. This is very useful if you have customers you want to “steer” away from your normal traffic flow between PE routers. For example, this could be due to certain SLA’s. I will be using the following topology to demonstrate how this can be done: A short walkthrough of the topology is in order.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network. LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection. However another aspect of using LISP involves its tunneling mechanism.

Its been a long time since my last update. I apologise for this. It wasnt my intention, it just sort of happened. In the meantime I have tried the CCIE SP lab and didnt pass it, so I am still studying for my next attempt which is comming up shortly. Until then I have booked quite a number of rack hours. Hopefully I will learn from some of the mistakes I have identified.

In this post i would like to explain how you can fix a multicast RPF failure using BGP. If you take a look at the topology in figure 1, we have a network running EIGRP as the IGP and where R1 advertises its loopback 0 (1.1.1.1/32). R4 also has a loopback 0 with the 4.4.4.4/32 address. EIGRP adjacencies are running between R1 and R2, R1 and R3, R2 and R3 and finally R3 and R4.

NTP has always been one of those things I have found tricky to really lab up. Its fairly easy to setup, but verifying whether everything is working as you expect, can be hard because it takes a while to synchronize (and even unsynchronize). In this post I will try and shed some light on the “ntp access-group” command set in Cisco IOS. When you perform a “?” on the command set it looks like the following (on 12.

I’ve had a little time readjusting after my exam and I’ve given some thought on what to keep me busy next. Basically I have 3 projects to keep me busy for the next foreseeable future. 1) CCNA-Wireless My boss came to me a week ago and tasked me with this. He was very humble about it, which was amusing. I will be allocated some time from my normal work projects to study for the exam, which is really helpful.

In this post I will be showing you how its possible to use different paths between your PE routers on a per VRF basis. This is very useful if you have customers you want to “steer” away from your normal traffic flow between PE routers. For example, this could be due to certain SLA’s. I will be using the following topology to demonstrate how this can be done: A short walkthrough of the topology is in order.

At the moment I’m going through whitepapers, Cisco Live 365 presentations and IOS XR fundamentals learning about switching fabrics. Its a steep learning curve, but in its own way its quite fascinating. There are a lot of acronyms to be mastered, so later on i will post a list that might serve myself and others when looking at these sort of architectures.

I have a lot of non-technical related projects in the pipeline, but study wise, whats next up for me is the IOS XR specialist exam. I think the blueprint for it looks interesting and it provides a way for me to learn more about IOS XR. I don’t really have a date for the exam just yet as I’m taking it easy and trying to lab out as much as i can to have it stick.

As im sitting here in the hotel, waiting to leave for the airport, the only thing on my mind is: Wow.. what an amazing week this has been. I have met so many old friends and made a bunch of new ones. All of the Tech Field Day delegates and staff are so bright and friendly that its hard to put into words. We have debated, discussed, thought out loud, shrugged our shoulders and laughed hard.

I am honoured to have been selected as a delegate for Tech Field Day during Cisco Live Europe 2019 in Barcelona! Cisco Live Europe will take place from the 27th of January until Friday 1st. I am really looking forward to this opportunity. There are some really great names among the list of delegates that I hope to be interacting with quite a lot, both during and after the event.

Small update. I was fortunate enough to be selected as a Cisco Champion for 2019. Looking forward to alot of good information and cooperation from the program! 🙂  

I recently decided that i would like to utilize Observium as well as rancid for configuration backups on my home network. To that effect, the following links really helped me out getting it all setup correctly: https://docs.observium.org/rancid/ http://packetsandpings.blogspot.com/2013/05/installing-and-configuring-rancid.html https://layer77.net/2016/08/10/upgrading-from-rancid-2-3-8-to-3-4-1/ Let me know if you run into anything i might help out with. /Kim

New Server: So I just completed a purchase off eBay for a new server for my lab purposes. For a while now I’ve been limited to 32Gb of memory on my old ESXi server, which is really more like 20Gb when my regular servers have had their share. Running a combination of different types of devices, each taking at least 4Gb of memory, doesn’t leave much room for larger labs.

I am fortunate enough, to be able to goto Cisco Live US! again this year. Last year was such an experience, that my hopes are really high for this year as well. I will be arriving on Friday the 8th and leaving on the 15th. Not a long stay this time, but it was what my boss could arrange for. Again this year I will be bringing my better half, so she can experience the city and hopefully we’ll get a few hours of sightseeing in between commitments.

Wow, what a busy month this has been! So I started my new job on February 1st and thus far, everything has been really great. My new coworkers are very friendly and helpful. I’ve spent the better part of february, trying to get to grips with the SP network I will be focusing on from now on. Im still not where I want to be yet, but im getting there. One of the guys I will be working very closely with, started cleaning up the network when he was hired 9 months ago and he’s done a really great job with what he’s had to work with.

This post is my follow-up on a recent discussion on twitter. Working for a VAR (Value Added Reseller) is not always the glamours life some make it out to be. Working as a consultant, what you are really doing, is being the CEO of your own service company. What you are selling, is basically your own services. The fact that your paycheck is being signed by someone else doesnt/shouldnt really matter.

Why do i keep focusing so much on Cisco, when there are clearly alot of different vendors out there with similar products and technologies? There are several reasons for this. 1) I began the professional part of my networking career with Cisco. 2) Cisco has a proven track record when it comes to education and learning. 3) Even though not always the best match for all use-cases, Cisco is a big player in almost all areas of networking.

People often ask me why i keep studying and when i will be “done”. To me, this type of question seems odd, because i am committed to lifelong learning. I am of the opinion that going through life without learning something all the time would be a life wasted. I think this goes back to the early explorers. Discovering new things, whether it be a new continent or simply a piece of knowledge really excites a certain type of people.

Even though im still in San Diego, Cisco Live! US 2015 is but a memory. But what a memory it is! It being my first time attending a Cisco Live conference, I didn’t really know what to expect. What I was met with, was a conference full of really sharp and nice people. The conference staff was very helpful and polite and really made an impression on me, from the time I first stepped onto the pavement outside San Diego convention center.

I have decided to change my focus quite a bit. I was planning on tackling the IOS-XR exam this year and was preparing for it by going through the blueprint. However another track kept pulling me towards it, and ofcourse thats the CCDE track. I have spent the last 6 years learning how to do something, but so far i havent spent alot of time thinking about why that is.

Well, a short update. I managed to pass the CCIE Service Provider lab exam on March 14th. I am quite exhausted from the experience, but very happy 🙂

I just had a chance to go ahead and read Mr. Greg Ferro’s ebook called ”Arse First Method of Technical Blogging“. The book is being published by Leanpub (leanpub.com), an independent publisher and the readers will get free updates to the book as they become available. Mr. Ferro is well known from Etherealmind.com as well as the Packet Pushers podcast. The book is all about writing a technical blog. It takes you through some important facets of writing a blog, namely why to blog in the first place and the importance of actually publishing something.

I just ordered my ticket for DKNOG, which will be happening on March 21st in Copenhagen. Catch me there if you can! www.dknog.dk

Wow. The other day, someone posted a link to [zenhabits.net]. and I was hooked right away. The entire idea around being “Zen’ish” really appeals to me on a fundamental level. I like the idea behind it, i like what it entails, i like the discipline and i like the calmness. Do i want to give everything up and join a monastery? – No, definitely not. That is what is so great about this site.

Yesterday brought with it another Java security breach. It is security breach that doesnt yet have a fix for it (0-day), so short of disabling Java on your computer, you are out of luck. Im continually amazed that we keep running this piece of software, but I guess I shouldnt be, given people’s track record of running insecure software (think older Internet Explorer browsers on windows). My dilemma as a Danish citizen is the fact that we are forced to run Java applications from a certain vendor in order to access pretty much anything from our online banking, to our communication with the government.

Just wanted to share another great motivational video  

Sorry for the lack of contents lately. I am dealing with some personal issues that put a bit of a pause to my studies. As soon as I’m fit for it I will put up some stuff related to the SP space. Until then, take care everybody.

Today I came across a blog post from a guy which I respect deeply. However, I disagree wholeheartedly with the content in the post. The title says: “That Setting Yourself Goals is Practising Failure” and the entire post can be found here. In summary, it states that setting yourself goals, is missing out on the dynamic nature of life, as it is constantly changing. By setting yourself one goal and succeeding in getting there and then just create another goal is pointless.

Its been a rough week. I have been finishing up projects and getting rid of loose ends. I have also been giving a couple of lectures on IPv6 (Basically primers) to customers as well as some information on basic failover configuration in IOS. The advent of 3G and low cost gives alot of new opportunities for customers. The rumor mill indicator is a solid green with news of the comming iPad 3.

The picture below should be put into a frame and put onto the desk of everyone in the IT industry. By day, I am a consultant, so I have quite a few stories that relate to this picture. Obviously the picture shows that, at every step in a project there are misunderstandings. In most instances, this is not intentionally, but simply a result of people not understanding where the other party is coming from and heading to.

Finally. I have been using Things as my task management program for about 5-6 months. Its been better than not using anything at all, but what has really annoyed me quite heavily is its inability to do “Cloud” synchronization. The only form of synchronization from Things is through your wireless network. And even so, just directly to your Mac, which then syncs to the other devices. I use 4 devices, every day.

I own alot of books. By books, i mean those paper things, that takes up alot of space and for which we chop down trees. Recently, i have been shifting my reading onto my iPad. Its easy to carry around, it holds multiple books and pdf files. On top of that, i find its a great reading device. The fonts are rendered fantastically and they are easy on the eyes to read.

This will be the last post of 2011. It’s been a very interesting year in a lot of different areas. The most important for me personally has been the achievement of my CCIE. I have worked very hard for this and it finally paid off. My girlfriend and I also decided it was time to look for a house. We have spent many hours looking through papers and online advertisements for homes.

I have finally decided to clean up my Routing & Switching notes and more importantly moving them from Microsoft OneNote to Microsoft Word. I know, I know, its still Microsoft, but even though OneNote has been okay for my needs, the lack of the program for Mac OS is annoying the crap out of me. Going through this process is going to be interesting, as i have found myself verifying things and trying out the technologies again.

Lately i have been making it a goal of mine to watch a TED video a day. I do this in order to expand my horizon and learn things that i normally wouldnt pay much attention to. Something as foreign to me as a music conductor explaining how to perform a piece of music, what it takes and why he does it, makes me a more informed human being. I can highly recommend it, so head on over to ted.

I am back from our company trip to Dubai. Dubai is a fantastic place. Its my first time in the middle east and it left a great impression. The whole city struck me as a proof-of-concept kind of city. They decided they wanted to do something great and they went ahead and did it. Even better, they did it without much red-tape. From impressive buildings like Burj Khalifa (Wikipedia) being the tallest building in the world to the biggest mall in the world, everything is just impressive.

Lately i have been watching a Ted video each day. I find this fascinating as i learn stuff in areas i would not normally be looking. I can highly recommend this to anyone in order to stay informed on whats going on in our world. Go there now: Ted.com

Some time has passed since i got my CCIE number. I have spent the time reflecting on the time that has passed since starting my CCIE journey. I will write down my journey in more detail later on for those who are interested. Right now im trying to work out the details on future goals. It is also a deep-rest time for me as i have what seems like an endless amount of time on my hands.

Hi everyone, I am happy to announce that this week i passed the R&S CCIE lab exam. CCIE #29189. Its been a long journey for me. Working full time, not taking any dedicated time off work to do so, has been challenging. Its been a journey which has challenged me in every way, but also one that has been straining every part of my life. I have given up alot to get to this point.

Warning: The following is primarily a rant! You might not find it applicable in your situation, or you might simply not care. You have been warned 🙂 Having been a consultant for a while now, i am constantly amazed at how solutions are made up and what is sold simply because it has a buzz-word in its title or description. For example. A salesperson selling a firewall because it has “Intrusion Prevention” listed down the list in its feature-set.

I have received the rest of my routers (1841s), I have also received the memory and flash upgrades for them all (256meg memory and 64mb flash). The guy who sold them to me was very helpful and it turned out he had the cables that i needed as well (some Smart-serial to Smart-serial, as well as some DB60 ones). Right now im doing some configuration for my access-server as well as checking out that all the memory and flash modules work as expected.

Welcome to 2011. I hope that you have had time to enjoy the holidays and all the festivities that come with it. Personally i have been doing alot of work stuff. Moving data centers is no small task when the customers want constant uptime. Of course for some customers this couldnt be done as they dont have fully redundant systems to switch over to. However a large part could be done very fast, but they all needed to be done at night and preferably during the weekends.

The month of December has been crazy for me. A ton of work related stuff has been going on. Our HQ move has taken its toll on everybody. Ive been working through every weekend, putting in some 20 odd hours on some days. Yesterday we pulled the last plug from the old location, having switched over all of our BGP peerings to the new datacenter. Fortunally this went off without a hitch.

Its been just over two weeks since my lab attempt. I have basically done no studying at all during that time. Time has come to get back in the game. I do have alot of work to do in the near future, but i will still try and do all the studying i can squeeze in. IPexpert volume 3 labs is comming up and im anxious to see how they are.

First shot = Failure. So i had my first lab attempt on tuesday the 2nd of November. Boy was it hard 🙂 Unfortunally i didnt pass this time around. I did very well in the troubleshooting part, but the configuration part, got the best of me. There are several reasons for this, but among the top ones is the fact that i didnt follow my own strategy. My strategy was to do what ive done many many times before.

At the bootcamp last week, i was almost out of reach from my lab. Even though i just got the remote power controller, the network at both the conference place as well as the hotel (especially the hotel!) was pretty bad. Attached is a screenshot of what sort of latency i was dealing with at the hotel: Latency Madness   This means im trying to catch up on Volume 2 labs i was planning to do while there.

As you may have noticed from my inexcusable lack of posts, ive been very busy. I have been finishing up IPexperts volume 1 workbooks and now going through volume 2. Still lots of interesting details to learn about. I have also managed to get most of my video-on-demand material onto my iPad so i have easier access to it. Next week (tuesday until saturday) ill be in the UK for Narbik’s bootcamp.

Im back from vacation. I can now with convinction state that hotels in Spain are not up to par with other places. I have been to Spain twice now, and they NEVER have an internet connection in the rooms. You had Wifi in the lobby, 2€ for an hour, and it barely worked. Hence i could not work on my home rack at all. This meant i spent only a few hours to watch Video On Demand.

I have started doing IPexpert Vol 1. technology labs. They are pretty challeging. They make you think out of the box. Almost none of it is vanilla configuration. I dont know how closely these labs reflect the real one. Ofcourse these are Vol. 1 labs, but what i mean by it, is especially the wording. Maybe its just me. If you get a task stating you have to do something, what i find hard, is to allow myself to implement any special solution that comes to mind, even though it seems radical.

Update 11-08-2010: I can now create RMON alarms and events. It seems the command set for RMON is pretty limited. Not much around the net as to how deep to go into this. Hope its enough. I just looked over the detailed blueprint which is authored by cisco. It had checkmarks, which i used to mark down things i knew i could configure, as well as things i really need more training in.

I wanted to take the opportunity to pitch in on the discussion thats presented in this article by Ivan Pepelnjak: http://blog.ioshints.info/2010/07/p2p-traffic-is-bad-for-network.html with the headline of “P2P traffic is bad for the network”. I agree with the headline… Somewhat… P2P is bad for the network, in the sense that it causes congestion and because of that, it makes using the net a bad experience for everyone else. But then again, it seems like theres a real need for P2P traffic (disregarding the entire illegal download discussion).

Im trying out a new design layout. Its not quite finished yet, need some tweaks here and there, but im hoping it will be a bit easier to read my posts in the future. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Anyone who has been following Cisco products recently (last year or so), must have noticed Cisco’s new products. This includes the Flip video recorder as well as the new tablet that has just been announced. On top of that, adding the Linksys brand to their portfolio a couple of years ago, proves they are going in a completely different direction than previously. Cisco has always been viewed as a top notch brand by their customers.

I am in the process of figuring out how to get to another bootcamp (Narbik). Unfortunally alot of classes in Europe have been cancelled due to lack of students. This pretty much leaves me with going to the US at some point. I want the date/bootcamp confirmed before i order plane tickets/hotel and whatnot. Hopefully this can be worked out soon. I have finished all of the labs in both volume 1 and volume 2.

I wanted to take some time to write up something about the cost of doing the CCIE track. This is prompted by some recent events in the CCIE training community and some discussion on twitter about studying in an economic downturn. Now, there are a couple of different ways of thinking about this. I recognize them all, and see their validity, but i will pitch in on my thoughts about it.

Im pretty much back at my lab practice again. Doing Narbik’s labs. Last 5-6 labs is all about frame-relay, including FRTS, PIPQ (Which i never encountered before), fragmentation and compression. All good stuff. As someone on twitter mentioned, its really amazing that frame-relay is still on the lab exam. You would think that they would remove that topic and introduce some more MPLS. However, i guess that frame-relay is a good topic to do exam tasks as there are soo many small details.

It has been an insane extended weekend. We have been doing 90% physical stuff all weekend long. Most of Friday and Saturday passed, with us painting the living room ceiling. We wanted to freshen it up as we are working on creating a whole new living room. It will be an expensive journey for sure. Sunday we started picking up the new furniture. This also means that I haven’t had much time to study.

So im almost ready to release my first version of my flashcards. I had hoped to reach 200 questions by today, but i havent been able to manage that yet. Lots of real life stuff has been happening today (completely cleaning two cars as well as putting summer-tires on them). I will be releasing my Mnemosyne database, which includes alot of the things i have a hard time remembering. I hope that others will some use for them as well!

Long time since last post. There are reasons for that. First of is labs. Ive been doing quite alot of labs. I finished Narbik’s Vol 1 workbook. All good stuff, and I learned alot of material that was not covered in the written blueprint. Alot of emphasis on IP SLA, which i really like. It provides a really good tool in your networking toolbox. Second is that work has taken its toll.

Lately I have been having a motivational down-period. I was doing alot of labs all evening/night and I was burned out. So I have been enjoying easter with family and girlfriend. It has been very nice. However, im starting to feel the urge of going back to the labs again which is good. Hopefully i will start tonight or tomorrow again. I have a post regarding BGP in my draft section which I hope to share with you guys tomorrow as well.

Im learning something new at work almost every day. We do alot of voice installations, some directly for the customer, others we host. Voice has always been a strange world to me, and it still is. Basically it boils down to the fact that it doesnt interest me what so ever. As said, I am learning though. I need to know my way around the voice world to some extent to be better at my job, and to be a better all-round engineer.

I thought i would write a bit about my bootcamp last week. Here’s what I have come up with. I will update this as more thoughts flow into my head 🙂 Day one at Narbik’s bootcamp: —————————– What an eye opener. This guy has his stuff under control! We started out with switching topics. Configured all sorts of things. We were told that 60% would be configuration and hands on stuff, while the remaining 40% would be theory (chalk talk).

Just wanted to let everyone know that im working on a post describing the Narbik bootcamp. Just concentrated on labs at the moment. It will arrive shortly 🙂

Im done packing for Narbiks bootcamp next week. I will be flying out tomorrow morning and probably be at the hotel at around 1ish in the afternoon. I have brought my training clothes, and hopefully ill get to utilize the hotel gym facilities during the day. I also have about 20 pages left of the volume II workbook, which ill do remote on my home lab. These are actually the hardest labs so far.

I normally dont post/view/send alot of video clips around. But today this entered my twitter, and i thought id share it. I really find it an awesome clip: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEkz1XK75XE&hl=en_US&fs=1&] Hope you like it, take care!

I finally got around to ordering my bootcamp. I have chosen Narbik Kocharians bootcamp over both IPexpert and Internetwork Expert. I have only heard great things about his classes, so it was a pretty obvious choice for me. I will be going feb. 1st until feb. 5th. I am really looking forward to it, but it also presents me with alot of work to accomplish in the mean time. I have two foundation workbooks to go through in a very short timeframe.

Just wanted to create a quick post.. And the post is: Red Bull still rocks 🙂

I have been working on some OSPF scenarios lately. These was sparked by a post by Joe Astorino @ IPexpert. They are about the use of the forwarding address in Type 5 LSA’s generated by an ABR because of a Type 7 LSA in an NSSA area. Alot of the questions i had in regard to the blog post, was that I couldnt recreate the scenarios at all. Turns out the whole thing was a bit tilted in how an ABR elected which ASBR to pick for the forwarding address.

This topic has been bothering me for a while actually. In the last couple of years we have seen a wave of so called “social networking” sites. Those are sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. What these sites are supposed to bring you is a sense of being closer connected to your friends, family and peers. Noone can argue that this goal has not been reached, but i keep asking myself, at what cost?

I have just landed a new job. It is a networking company, doing alot of security, ip telephony and general network consulting. The company can be found here. It is called NetIP. The company is located about 30km from where I live, so a little drive in each direction is nessecary. I will start Thursday the 1st of October. I am looking forward to it. My last day at the previous job was yesterday, and it went by okay.

Its been a while, and for that im sorry. I have been very busy watching VOD (Video On Demand) classes from IPexpert. Scott Morris has done these videos, and he is pretty good at it in my opinion. There are alot of new stuff as well. Things such as Multilink Frame-relay (FRF.16) and PPP over frame-relay. IRB (Integrated Routing and Bridging) was also new for me. Basically you can extend your L2 over a L3 ip routed network.

I am getting used to hearing Scott Morris’s voice by now 🙂 I am doing Video On Demand classes at the moment. Im starting from the beginning and going through them one by one. Lots of new things to learn and study. Today for example i learned about “real” bridging. Since its not on any blueprint for CCNA, CCNP or even CCIE R&S, its not something ive come across before. It is a pretty cool feature.

One of my last tasks at work before I stop, is to create a new switched network for a location in Estonia. It will be a 10 switch network. The company is reusing two 3560 switches which I still need to receive. However, I got 8 new switches today, all 2960 switches, one of them being a 2960G switch, which is a very nice L2 switch. I just finished setting them up on my desk so I can start configuring them.

Lately I havent been keeping up my chores on the blog. Theres a good reason for this. I have really been studying hard to do the written exam again. Done lots of practice tests, a lot of technology focused labs on especially some edge areas where I wasnt 100% sure of things. And especially a lot of Cisco documentation. Every time I reached a snag I looked up the documentation from Cisco and read through what it was supposed to do and how.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I have been very busy with real-life things as well as reading a bunch of stuff. Does anyone know if it is legal to advertise on wordpress.com? I cant find any guidelines regarding this in the terms-of-service. Also, if it IS legal, how do you do it? I have been searching around and cant find any widgets that allow me to insert an advertisement?

This week I will be spending alot of time at various of doctors unfortunally. I still suffer from fearing everything is physically wrong with me. Im having it all checked out. I would really like a blank sheet to start a new life from. However, a blank sheet requires a total checkup. I hope everything works out! I am also going to a hypnotist, to see if she can somehow tweak my mind into something else than thinking about my physical state constantly.

I just emptied my shopping basket on amazon again. This means I ordered what was in it 🙂 I got some CCIE books, but this doesnt mean anything except I am interested in whats in them. Also got a few other non-technical books. Among other things I ordered Brian Tracy’s book: Goals! which I saw mentioned on Chris Bryants site. Maybe I can pick up a few tips and tricks. Also got a book on anxiety and how to combat it without the use of drugs.

I skimmed over the ONT blueprint, and it sure seems like alot of voice. I am not quite sure howcome theres that much voice material on there. It bothers me quite frankly, because I dont find the voice part particularly interesting. But alas, I digress, theres just one way to the CCNP, and thats through ONT. I need to come up with a good study plan, to take into account my anxiety.

So I havent posted for a while, because i have been admitted to the hospital. I am suffering from anxiety attacks, and its something I need to do my best to combat in order to live a normal life again. So ill use this place to hold my thoughts regarding this goal as well. Imagine being trapped in your body which is having physical pain, and not being able to escape it in any way.

I just passed ISCW. Im really glad this one is over with. But I have ALOT of reviewing for the material in this one, when i finish the rest of the CCNP track. I could especially feel that not having access to the FW and IPS parts really hurt me. Unfortunally I cant afford any of the very pricy IOS images, for any of my devices, that will support the FW and IPS feature set.

I really wish I would feel more ready for this one. On top of things, I feel sick again… Never ending story. I wish someone could just cure me once and for all. I have been somewhat sick for the better part of 3 months now, and its really starting to take its toll. I feel really depressed and down at the moment. What to do? I have no idea. Neither does the doctors.

Okay, Xmas is over and so is new years as Im writing this. Im behind regular postings, I know, which is frustrating. I am done with the preliminary reading and lab work for ISCW, but I dont feel prepared for it at all. Its even worse than it was for BCMSN. I think the lack of an official study guide really got me off track. I will have to investigate further how to create a study plan on the topics on the blueprint and then come to a full understanding and assurance I got the topics down.

I am trying to get some reading done, even though its extremely hard when im still sick. However, I only got about 5 chapters left in the examination guide. hopefully I can finish them soon, and do some of the last case studies in the lab book. I really want to get this BCMSN out of the way, its starting to get on my nerves. I dont feel prepared enough for the exam though, I dont know why.

Sorry for the non-posts. I am quite sick at the moment. Some stomach issues that apparently takes its time to settle. I was hospitalized 10 days ago, but got out the next day. Since then, I have not been to work or been doing anything at all actually. The only thing I have accomplished is watching alot of episodes of X-Files, but I would much rather be my normal self again, or at least not sick.

I have been working my a** off trying to understand STP just fairly well. Its a hard topic, especially with Rapid STP. I have struggled with the synchronisation/proposal/agreement thing. It has helped seeing it on the equipment though. An alternate port can be switched to immediately. If the root port goes down and the switch has a designated port, it performs the proposal/agreement bit, and another switch becomes a designated bridge for it.

Sorry about the lack of posting/progress reports. Also the server has been down for a while. In the meantime, I’ve passed the BSCI exam with an 833 score. Really got my ass kicked on some topics I didnt expect (IS-IS), and ofcourse multicasting which has turned out to be my arch-enemy. I should have done some more labs on ISIS, but I didnt since it didnt take up too much space according to the exam blueprint.

Well, at least some of it. Adjacencies and how IS’s update other IS’s is the thing that nobody can give me an answer to. According to all the material IS’s maintain adjacencies to all others, but still elect a DIS. When doing the labs on this, the only thing I can see the DIS doing is sending out CSNP’s (Complete Sequence Network PDU’s). The DIS is also sending out hello’s every 3.

So yesterday, I started with all the lab exercises that has to do with EIGRP. I did the one in the self-study guide, and one (2.7.1) in the lab portfolio. I also started on 2.7.2. So far, the labs in the labportfolio are far better written than the ones in the self-study guide. Today, I have snuck in a few practice scenarios regarding default route propagation. 3 ways to do it:

Alright, I am done with reading about EIGRP. I am now skimming through the chapter, and taking notes. I have an okay understanding of how EIGRP works, and I am looking forward to the labs to nail out unknowns. I am not 100% convinced about taking notes, or rather doing it in the order im doing (reading first, then skimming and taking notes, then going to the lab). However, when Im done with note-taking i can cross out the “Explain the functions and operations of EIGRP” in the exam blueprint 🙂

Today, I am continuing reading about EIGRP. My goal for today is to get at least 40 pages of EIGRP reading done. Lots of nitty gritty details such as unequal-load balancing and route authentication. To understand and process the material, 10 pages takes up 30 minutes of reading time. This includes reading the material, looking at the topologies being presented and thinking it through (in case of metrics and bandwidth calculate a bit to see where the authors are getting at).

Chapter 3, EIGRP. Started reading about the inner workings of EIGRP today. EIGRP is an improved distance vector protocol provided by Cisco themselves. It is an improved distance vector protocol, because it passes updates directly to its neighbours. It is more advanced than traditional distance vector protocols, because it supports VLSM and it does not use periodic updates. It uses hello packets like link-state protocols. 1st reading done includes: EIGRP packet types.

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.

Okay, so its been a while since my last post. Been having some issues to deal with, which has taken quite alot of energy. I am going for the CCNP, starting with the BSCI exam. Ive got the books for it, and started studying. There’s alot of detailed information, and lots of labs to do. Chapter 2 is 40 pages long, and its taken me two days to reach the end of the information in the book, now im starting the labs in the end of the chapter 🙂

I am happy to report that I managed to pass the CCNA exam yesterday. What a relief. Here it is: Hopefully Maibrith passes her exam today as well!! Update: She did pass it!

So, test is scheduled for tuesday, and im looking through and updating my notes. My plan is to look through all of my notes on the morning, trying to pick up on anything I might have missed during my studying. Also doing some subnetquestions during my awaken hours to keep my mind up to date doing that kind of work. Unfortunally there is a 2 hour drive to the test center, which I could do without, but thats the name of the game.

I just purchased a Rack from Dantrak UK. I need some sort of solution to mount the gear I have and will be getting. I cant have it all lay around the floor. They (Dantrak UK) is basically a reseller of Dantraknet. I went for the 16U version, in case I will need more space in the future it is upgradeable. Here it is:

I like sunny weather when its moderate, but temperatures in the 25+ Celcius range is a bit too much for me. Especially when I need to spend time in front of my computer. I will need some kind of cooling solution this summer for sure. My idea was a fan with a timer on it for falling asleep, but not having it turned on all night (the draft will make you sick).

Im writing this on my 3rd HP laptop in 2 years. This is a company owned laptop, because if not, I would never have purchased another laptop from Hewlett Packard. My first HP laptop was a so called NC8430, which is in their line of business laptops. It replaced a T20/T21 (I have forgotten), which was 3+ years old, and still working fine. The NC8430 has a 15″ display, 256mb graphics card, comes with 1 gig of ram (which I had upgraded to 2gig right away), and as far as i remember, a 60 or 80 gb harddrive.

Since starting my now almost infamous Cisco course, I have become very interested in ways to learn new material. How do you plan out a semester, how do you organize a study schedule, where do you study? what kind of tools do you use to get you through it all? Ive been looking into some of the tips that Lifehacker.com provides, but Id like to figure out what other people have done to get their study needs met.

I watched an iPhone get a dent yesterday. Not a pretty sight. It was my girlfriends iPhone. She dropped it on the floor, and unfortunally it landed on the edge of a doorstep, causing it to get a dent. Nothing wrong with the glass surface or function of the phone at all. Ive dropped mine a few times on rocky concrete, without it getting scratches on the glass surface, which has really surprised me.

Been having alot on my mind lately. Ive been writing down the topics I want to give my opinion on, but just havent gotten around to actually elaborating on them. I will try to rectify that over the comming days. The main reason for this lack of posts, is because of what happened with my health. I really thought I had those panic attacks beaten. However, I must admit to myself, that I need to go another round with this enemy of mine.

Trip to China cut short. For some reason I fell sick in Amsterdam and had to go back to Denmark. Im out sick until friday where I will get to see my doctor. Im quite convinced that what I experienced was a panic attack that just wouldnt go away for some reason. Something needs to be done about this whole thing, its not getting any better and im using way too much energy even thinking about it.

So Ive hit a snag in my learning process. There is a question on one of the chapter tests, that I simply cannot work out. I know the answer, but I simply cant figure out how to that answer. It is really pissing me off. What I want to vent right now, is that its really detrimental to my overoal goal of passing this course, If i cant get past the mental block that “I dont understand something!

In recent months ive re-experienced what its like to have a bad teacher. Im currently taking a CCNA certification, and anyone who has taken one, know there is ALOT of material to go through. To have a good teacher help you with questions and problems would be a huge help. Unfortunally I am not in a position to say I have a good teacher. The place where Im taking the CCNA course have to teachers teaching CCNA, one of them is reportedly enthusiastic, skilled and very motivated about the material, the other, I can now testify, seems to think he’s knowledgeable.

Another attack. I suffer from depression along with anxiety/panic attacks. When I was 21, I all of a sudden felt like I couldnt breathe, and everything around me seemed to blur and sound funny. I was at work, and was forced to leave work and drive to my parents house, since I knew that, at the time being nobody was home. Unfortunally my mom was not home from work yet, so I lay down on the living room floor and waited, still feeling really really bad.

I was doing some lan QoS yesterday evening. Specifically i wanted to mark some packets. As usual, i wanted to create a policy-map, referencing some class-map, and then set the IP precedence value. I tried to get this working for like 3 hours. I was verifying the behavior using the “sh policy-map interface ” command, but it kept showing that there was no packets being matched. As said, after 3 hours of searching the net for information, Doc CD and reading QoS exam guide, i was still nowhere.

Interesting indeed.

I was checking piratgruppen.org (A place in favor of sharing things online) the other day, and found that a new site, rettighedsportalen.dk had been started by a former spokesperson of piratgruppen.org. The site aims to shed some light on immaterial “rights”. This is a good idea and I for one welcome it. One of the first articles that was posted was from the chairman of KODA, a rightsholder organisation for composers in Denmark.

This is another great strategic move by the republican party. Let the two democrats fight against each other all they can, while taking focus of John McCain. Then when the real election cycle begins, they can put credibility behind a claim that the democratic candidates are focusing more on getting elected than the real issues, and they dont have a clear focus on solving the problems that the United States faces.

But it was a close one: “The vote was close, with 314 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) voting in favor of an amendment to scrap what many consider draconian and disproportionate measures to protect copyright over the internet, and 297 voting against the amendment.“ That means there are still 297 souls out there, that really dont get that Internet access is vital for any person living in this day an age.

Filesharing, as I define it, is a way for people to share files with one and another. Filesharing programs, are programs that enable people to do so. The programming instructions which perform the transfer of bits from one computer to another is a technology. Slicing, as I define it, is a way for people to slice something, ie. a loaf of bread. A knife, is a tool that enable people to slice bread.

What do you think?

This is what the white house looked like during Earth Hour: Earth Hour – An hour where alot of citizens around the world turned of their lights to save electricity, and thereby showing their concern for the environment. I participated, did you?

A plane from Copenhagen to Amsterdam, was cancelled yesterday, because of fear of terror. A group of middle eastern men (all of whom are airline pilots in an Iraqi airline), was the cause of the fear to a Dutch man. One of the middle eastern men, had to use the restrooms, and, like me, you and everybody else, left his luggage (carry-on-bag) with his friends. This apparently was a cause for alarm, the police was called, the plane cancelled, and all for nothing.

America’s war on tourism: airlines to foot the bill for fingerprinting foreigners as the leave the US Scotland Yard wants DNA samples from 5-year-olds in case they grow up to be criminals; Oyster card records to become part of “war on terror” I mean, come on. Do you really think this sort of thing is sensible to do? If you read the first article, you will know that the US laws, regarding scanning/fingerprinting/probing of foreigners coming to the country, have only found 1000 Visa-Over-stayers at a price of $15.

Take a look at this little picture helping you, fight the biggest problem facing humanity – global warming:

A link on Digg pointed towards a YouTube video explaining Net neutrality. This is an important subject, not just in the US, but everywhere. The Telco’s might own the pipes, but they shouldnt get to decide what gets to flow through them. Check it out.  

Reading Marc Andreessen’s blog I came across his endorsement of Barack Obama. He writes of a meeting in early 2007, which basically shapes his opinion about Barack Obama. Without meeting the man, this is the impression I have as well. Link to blog post.

How will peace ever be established between the large parts of the muslim world and the west, when young kids are being taught to kill for depicting a god in a way you dont like? Well, thats exactly what a children show stipulated a few days ago, regarding the now infamous Muhammed drawings. A show for kids by the palestinian channel al Aqsa, had a pink bunny say, that if the artist behind the drawings ever did such a thing again, he must certainly die!

“and do you really believe 10,000 outraged letters to a congressman outweigh $10,000 in unmarked bills? government is one of the few real bargains left” Seen on BoingBoing.net regarding the ComCast hearing (FCC)

So Larry Lessig has decided not to run for congress. The decision comes mainly because of time and fear it might damage the entire “Change Congress” campaign. I can understand that position. I would very much like to see a game plan on how this campaign will gain momentum. And I would really like to help out, but seeing as im not an American, theres apparently not much I can do to help 🙁

I have given some thought about Larry Lessig’s possible candidacy for congress. I have come to the conclussion that I would agree with it, for the following reasons: Exposure. Rally the right people. For starters, I believe that by running for congress, Lessig will create some exposure about the corruption in American politics. Everybody knows its there, but nobody is willing to change it. Lessig is out to change it, and for that very reason, all exposure is good exposure.

Just noticed that Lessig is considering running for congress this year. I am not quite sure how I feel about this yet. I have great admiration for all his work so far, but i guess i just have a bad feeling about all politicians in the beginning. Will Lessig be able to change anything from within congress, and does it really matter if he makes it or not, as long as he makes enough noise about the issues, in doing so?

Yesterday I read about a Clinton supporter going Obama. However, it was the way in which she changed her support that was interesting. She wrote a piece, a great piece to be exact, outlining the reasons why she believed that Clinton should step down, and offer her full support to Obama. Her point was spot on in my opinion. Hillary Clinton simply doesnt have what it takes to run against Senator John McCain.

Practical OTV ————- This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v. I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved. A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI. Instead, I wanted to have full multicast running in the SP core in order to gain a full understanding of the packet forwarding and encapsulation.

In this post I would like to give a demonstration of using the Auto-Tunnel Mesh group feature. As you may know, manual MPLS-TE tunnels are first and foremost unidirectional, meaning that if you do them between two PE nodes, you have to do a tunnel in each direction with the local PE node being the headend. Now imagine if your network had 10 PE routers and you wanted to do a full mesh between them, this can become pretty burdensome and error-prone.

In this post I would like to highlight a relative new (to me) application of MPLS called Unified MPLS. The goal of Unified MPLS is to separate your network into individual segments of IGP’s in order to keep your core network as simple as possible while still maintaining an end-to-end LSP for regular MPLS applications such as L3 VPN’s. What we are doing is simply to put Route Reflectors into the forwarding path and changing the next-hop’s along the way, essentially stiching together the final LSP.

In this post i will show how and why to use a feature called IPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD). IPv6 prefix delegation is a feature that provides the capability to delegate or hand out IPv6 prefixes to other routers without the need to hardcode these prefixes into the routers. Why would you want to do this? – Well, for one is the administration overhead associated with manual configuration. If the end-customer only cares about the amount of prefixes he or she receives, then it might as well be handed out automatically from a preconfigure pool.

In this post I will be showing you how its possible to use different paths between your PE routers on a per VRF basis. This is very useful if you have customers you want to “steer” away from your normal traffic flow between PE routers. For example, this could be due to certain SLA’s. I will be using the following topology to demonstrate how this can be done: A short walkthrough of the topology is in order.

In this fairly short post, id like to address a topic that came up on IRC (#cciestudy @ freenode.net). Its about how you select a route thats being redistributed into an OSPF NSSA area and comes into the OSPF backbone area 0. For my post i will be using the very simple topology below. Nothing else is necessary to illustrate what is going on. First off, id like to clarify a few things about what takes place when redistributing routes into an NSSA area.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network. LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection. However another aspect of using LISP involves its tunneling mechanism.

At the moment I’m going through whitepapers, Cisco Live 365 presentations and IOS XR fundamentals learning about switching fabrics. Its a steep learning curve, but in its own way its quite fascinating. There are a lot of acronyms to be mastered, so later on i will post a list that might serve myself and others when looking at these sort of architectures.

I have a lot of non-technical related projects in the pipeline, but study wise, whats next up for me is the IOS XR specialist exam. I think the blueprint for it looks interesting and it provides a way for me to learn more about IOS XR. I don’t really have a date for the exam just yet as I’m taking it easy and trying to lab out as much as i can to have it stick.

Its been a long time since my last update. I apologise for this. It wasnt my intention, it just sort of happened. In the meantime I have tried the CCIE SP lab and didnt pass it, so I am still studying for my next attempt which is comming up shortly. Until then I have booked quite a number of rack hours. Hopefully I will learn from some of the mistakes I have identified.

The CSNP on multiaccess networks The CSNP (Complete Sequence Number PDU) on multi-access networks is being sent out on behalf of the DIS (Designated Intermediate System), which acts as the pseudonode representing the multi-access network. Its being used as ISIS’s way of making sure everybody on the multi-access network is up to date. If thats not the case, the node which is missing some routing information can use PSNP (Partial Sequence Number PDU)’s to request the missing information from the DIS.

In this short post i want to try and shed some light on a couple of ISIS timers that had me confused at first. I think i got them down now, but please let me know if i have misunderstood them. The timers in question is “isis retransmit-interval ” and “isis retransmit-throttle-interval “. Both of these commands are only relevant on point-to-point links as no concept of a DIS is present here.

This morning I booked my first go with the CCIE Service Provider lab exam. The battle is in mid November, so I have some time to study. That also means that alot of forthcomming blog posts will be about CCIE SP material. I will try and blog about all the tricky features comming my way and provide plenty of examples. At the moment im very excited and at the same time very humble to have a go at the SP lab exam.

In this post i would like to explain the usage of the “MPLS VPN Per VRF Label” feature. By default, in each VRF, prefixes are assigned a VPN label, used to identify the route within the VRF itself. This label is the only label that is being looked at by the receiving PE router. In theory, you only need a single label to identify the VRF for the destination prefix, and then you can do an IP lookup to further process the packet.

“All that matters, is where you are going” is a favorite quote of mine. With that an update as well as a plan to move forward. I have now finished Narbik’s Volume 2 Service Provider workbook. It took a little while longer than I had planned. This is mainly because i took some time off during the holidays (well, studied less at least 🙂 ). Just today, I finished working on a plan of attack for the next phase of my studies.

I have now finished the Narbik Volume 1 labs. It took about 2,5 weeks to do. Im planning on spending a bit more time on the Volume 2 labs. Maybe about 3-4 weeks. I want to make sure i got all the foundational stuff down before advancing to some more complex labs. Nothing new on the hardware vs. rack rental front just yet. Im still debating on what to do.

In this short piece i would like to show how Frame-Relay PVC bundles work. A PVC bundle is exactly what the name says. Its a bundle of PVC’s, with each PVC handling a certain Precedence, MPLS EXP or DSCP. A requirement for the PVC bundle is that all IP Precedence or DSCP values will be handled by one of the PVC’s, so you need to set the “default” PVC unless

Just wanted to let you know of a good place to go for some IOS-XR training. Head on over to FryGuy’s place: http://www.fryguy.net/2012/11/06/ios-xr-cisco-videos-and-training/

I have recertified by doing the SP written exam. Took me a while, but now its done. My plan is to hit the labs, starting with Narbik’s SP workbook, working my way through that one. That should keep me occupied for quite a while. After that I plan on going to a SP bootcamp at some point in 2013. Which one and where im not sure of yet. It all depends on availability.

In this post i would like to demonstrate the Class-Based Tunnel Selection feature. In class-based tunnel selection, we will select an MPLS TE tunnel based on the incomming Precedence bit in the data. For example, IP Prec 5 goes to TE Tunnel 1, whereas IP Prec 3 goes to TE Tunnel 2. This sort of thing would be very useful for the SP if SLA’s are offered based on the incomming data.

In this post i would like to demonstrate the concept of a well known MPLS TE (Traffic Engineering) feature, known as Fast Reroute. Fast Reroute, as the name implies, is used to create an MPLS network, that has similar convergence properties of SONET/SDH APS of about 50 ms. Obviously, such aggressive convergence times are needed primarily in Service Provider networks or institutions with very high demands. For example financial institutions.

One of the cool things about MPLS is its versatility. In this post i will show how its possible for a service provider to support legacy frame-relay installations without actually having any frame-relay switches. I will establish an MPLS core and show how a customer with three sites, one hub site and two spoke sites, will never even know that the core is running MPLS and not end-to-end frame-relay. The hub site will have a single access-interface with two frame-relay PVC’s, one to each spoke site, where as the spoke sites will only have a connection to the hub site.

I have ordered the first batch of books for the CCIE SP track. They are: Traffic Engineering with MPLS Cisco IOS-XR Fundamentals MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies MPLS Configuration on Cisco IOS Software I was hoping that you could get them all as eBooks, but as it turns out, i can get some of them as eBooks through Kindle and some through Cisco Press PDF’s and others i could only get as hard copies.

The cat is out of the bag. I am going for my 2nd CCIE. This time its in the Service Provider track. For a while i have felt something missing. And what is missing is a clear cut direction on what i want to learn more about in my professional life. I had a choice to make. Should i simply pick out areas of interest in the networking space and learn what i could about those or should i commit to a certain CCIE track and follow that path of learning.

There’s news on INE’s Service Provider material. Updated workbooks for the SPv3 will be arriving “soon”. Hopefully that means within a month or two. If you are interested, you can read more and even get a peak into a sample lab. Head on over to INE here: Link

Forward Networks was one of the top presenters at TFDx at Cisco Live 2019 in Barcelona in my opinion. I really didn’t know much about what they were all about before we had the presentation. One thing I did notice was that they were really organized, even handing out agendas before beginning the presentation. Also, we were told that their engineering department in San Jose were staying up late to watch the Live Stream!

As im sitting here in the hotel, waiting to leave for the airport, the only thing on my mind is: Wow.. what an amazing week this has been. I have met so many old friends and made a bunch of new ones. All of the Tech Field Day delegates and staff are so bright and friendly that its hard to put into words. We have debated, discussed, thought out loud, shrugged our shoulders and laughed hard.

This week, I am attending Cisco’s EMEAR Enterprise Networking PVT in Amsterdam and I wanted to highlight some key takeaways. Cisco is really doubling down on getting its software strategy in place. Everything, and I mean everything gets a mention in regards to what sort of software is enabling it (DNA Center/SD-Access/SD-WAN etc.). First, ofcourse is the SD-WAN strategy. Cisco confirmed that most of the development of code is for the XE based vEdges to get them up and running.

I decided a while back I would spend a bit of time learning about the Cisco ASA firewall. This is the first post surrounding some technologies I have explored during that time. For some of you it might be easy stuff, but for others, including myself, might find it interesting for reference. One of the most used functions of a firewall is to provide NAT functions. The first one of the different modes of NAT i want to illustrate is Static PAT (Port Address Translation).

Forward Networks was one of the top presenters at TFDx at Cisco Live 2019 in Barcelona in my opinion. I really didn’t know much about what they were all about before we had the presentation. One thing I did notice was that they were really organized, even handing out agendas before beginning the presentation. Also, we were told that their engineering department in San Jose were staying up late to watch the Live Stream!

As im sitting here in the hotel, waiting to leave for the airport, the only thing on my mind is: Wow.. what an amazing week this has been. I have met so many old friends and made a bunch of new ones. All of the Tech Field Day delegates and staff are so bright and friendly that its hard to put into words. We have debated, discussed, thought out loud, shrugged our shoulders and laughed hard.

In just 3 days time I will be leaving for Cisco Live 2019 in Barcelona. Im thinking about what sort of event it will be and what to expect in term of announcements. Especially one thought keeps reappearing and thats the thought of the transformation of Cisco. It is no longer a company with a future in just selling hardware. It itself has been disrupted by the emergence of “everything software” and merchant silicon.

I am honoured to have been selected as a delegate for Tech Field Day during Cisco Live Europe 2019 in Barcelona! Cisco Live Europe will take place from the 27th of January until Friday 1st. I am really looking forward to this opportunity. There are some really great names among the list of delegates that I hope to be interacting with quite a lot, both during and after the event.

Small update. I was fortunate enough to be selected as a Cisco Champion for 2019. Looking forward to alot of good information and cooperation from the program! 🙂  

Practical OTV ————- This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v. I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved. A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI. Instead, I wanted to have full multicast running in the SP core in order to gain a full understanding of the packet forwarding and encapsulation.

I recently decided that i would like to utilize Observium as well as rancid for configuration backups on my home network. To that effect, the following links really helped me out getting it all setup correctly: https://docs.observium.org/rancid/ http://packetsandpings.blogspot.com/2013/05/installing-and-configuring-rancid.html https://layer77.net/2016/08/10/upgrading-from-rancid-2-3-8-to-3-4-1/ Let me know if you run into anything i might help out with. /Kim

I really like this paragraph, because almost everyone wants to imitate google. Why? well, the answer to that questions seems to be what everyone is missing! Google’s solutions were built for scale that basically doesn’t exist outside of a maybe a handful of companies with a trillion dollar valuation. It’s foolish to assume that their solutions are better. They’re just more scalable. But they are actually very feature-poor. There’s a tradeoff there.

I am currently reading Team of Teams, an excellent book! In it, it highlights an interesting fact that I think is very relevant for the networking world and that is the difference between something that is complicated versus something that is complex. There is a distinct difference in that something complicated can be broken down into its building blocks and analysed with a high degree of certainty. Think of a car engine for example.

I recently completed the entry level Juniper certification. I thought it would be a good idea to study for something other than the mighty Cisco, so Juniper’s JNCIA-Junos seemed like a good choice. It was a very fair exam I can highly recommend. Next up is AWS Solution Architect Associate. Need to get some cloud skills as thats where everything is going right? 🙂

By now, VxLAN is becoming the standard way of tunneling in the Datacenter. Using VxLAN, i will show how to use the CSR1Kv to extend your Datacenter L2 reach between sites as well. First off, what is VxLAN? It stands for Virtual Extensible LAN. Basically you have a way of decoupling your vlan’s into a new scheme. You basically map your VLAN into a VNI (Virtual Network Identifier), which in essence makes your VLAN numbering scheme locally significant.

In this post i would like to highlight a couple of “features” of ISIS. More specifically the authentication mechanism used and how it looks in the data plane. I will do this by configuring a couple of routers and configure the 2 authentication types available. I will then look at packet captures taken from the link between them and illustrate how its used by the ISIS process. The 2 types of Authentication are link-level authentication of the Hello messages used to establish an adjacency and the second type is the authentication used to authenticate the LSP’s (Link State Packet) themselves.

Hello folks, Im currently going through the INE DC videos and learning a lot about fabrics and how they work along with a fair bit of UCS information on top of that! Im spending an average of 2.5 hours on weekdays for study and a bit more in the weekends when time permits. I still have no firm commitment to the CCIE DC track, but at some point I need to commit to it and really get behind it.

New Server: So I just completed a purchase off eBay for a new server for my lab purposes. For a while now I’ve been limited to 32Gb of memory on my old ESXi server, which is really more like 20Gb when my regular servers have had their share. Running a combination of different types of devices, each taking at least 4Gb of memory, doesn’t leave much room for larger labs.

In this post I would like to give a demonstration of using the Auto-Tunnel Mesh group feature. As you may know, manual MPLS-TE tunnels are first and foremost unidirectional, meaning that if you do them between two PE nodes, you have to do a tunnel in each direction with the local PE node being the headend. Now imagine if your network had 10 PE routers and you wanted to do a full mesh between them, this can become pretty burdensome and error-prone.

In this post, I will put together a variety of different technologies involved in a real-life DMVPN deployment. This includes things such as the correct tunnel configuration, routing-configuration using BGP as the protocol of choice, as well as NAT toward an upstream provider and front-door VRF’s in order to implement a default-route on both the Hub and the Spokes and last, but not least a newer feature, namely Per-Tunnel QoS using NHRP.

I am fortunate enough, to be able to goto Cisco Live US! again this year. Last year was such an experience, that my hopes are really high for this year as well. I will be arriving on Friday the 8th and leaving on the 15th. Not a long stay this time, but it was what my boss could arrange for. Again this year I will be bringing my better half, so she can experience the city and hopefully we’ll get a few hours of sightseeing in between commitments.

Wow, what a busy month this has been! So I started my new job on February 1st and thus far, everything has been really great. My new coworkers are very friendly and helpful. I’ve spent the better part of february, trying to get to grips with the SP network I will be focusing on from now on. Im still not where I want to be yet, but im getting there. One of the guys I will be working very closely with, started cleaning up the network when he was hired 9 months ago and he’s done a really great job with what he’s had to work with.

This post is my follow-up on a recent discussion on twitter. Working for a VAR (Value Added Reseller) is not always the glamours life some make it out to be. Working as a consultant, what you are really doing, is being the CEO of your own service company. What you are selling, is basically your own services. The fact that your paycheck is being signed by someone else doesnt/shouldnt really matter.

Even though im still in San Diego, Cisco Live! US 2015 is but a memory. But what a memory it is! It being my first time attending a Cisco Live conference, I didn’t really know what to expect. What I was met with, was a conference full of really sharp and nice people. The conference staff was very helpful and polite and really made an impression on me, from the time I first stepped onto the pavement outside San Diego convention center.

This blog post outlines what “MPLS VPNs over mGRE” is all about as well as provide an example of such a configuration. So what is “MPLS VPNs over mGRE”? – Well, basically its taking regular MPLS VPN’s and using it over an IP only core network. Since VPN’s over MPLS is one of the primary drivers for implementing an MPLS network in the first place, using the same functionality over an IP-only core might be very compelling for some not willing/able to run MPLS label switching in the core.

This is my current schedule for the Cisco Live US 2015 event. Most are related to my CCDE studies and a few are with technologies and products that im interested in in general. Monday: 08:00 – 09:30 BRKSAN-2101 FCoE for small and mid size enterprises. 10:00 – 12:00 BRKCRS-2031 Enterprise Campus Design: Multilayer Architectures and Design Principles 13:00 – 15:00 BRKARC-2001 Cisco ASR1000 Series routers: System and Solution Architectures 15:30 – 17:00 GENKEY-1001 Cisco Vision Keynote

Just wanted to let you know that Daniel from lostintransit.se is doing a webinar on network design. I will be attending and helping out any way i can. Go here to learn more: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/community_cafe/2015/01/21/network-design-fundamentals-webinar-with-ciscovip-daniel-dib

Woke up to a very nice email today. I have been selected as a Cisco Champion for 2015! – Now i get to see what all the fuzz is about and hopefully be able to contribute something.

In this post id like to provide an example of a fairly new development to EIGRP which is called EIGRP Over The Top (OTP). In all its simplicity it establish an EIGRP multihop adjacency using LISP as the encapsulation method for transport through the WAN network. One of the applications of this would be to avoid relying on the SP in an MPLS L3 VPN. You could simply use the L3 VPN for transport between the interfaces directly connected to the Service Provider and run your own adjacency directly between your CPE routers (without the use of a GRE tunnel, which would be another method to do it)

In this fairly short post, id like to address a topic that came up on IRC (#cciestudy @ freenode.net). Its about how you select a route thats being redistributed into an OSPF NSSA area and comes into the OSPF backbone area 0. For my post i will be using the very simple topology below. Nothing else is necessary to illustrate what is going on. First off, id like to clarify a few things about what takes place when redistributing routes into an NSSA area.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network. LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection. However another aspect of using LISP involves its tunneling mechanism.

In the process of restudying EIGRP as a protocol, and more specifically as to how it converges, you can’t avoid running into the saying “Remember to bound your queries!”. From a conceptual point of view its fairly easy to understand that the further out you ask for a prefix the longer the convergence process will take. But what really takes place when you have different tools in place to bound the query from taking place?

Well, a short update. I managed to pass the CCIE Service Provider lab exam on March 14th. I am quite exhausted from the experience, but very happy 🙂

With the release of the IOS XRv router, along with CSR (Cloud Services Router), its time that I go ahead and build myself a virtualization solution. To that effect, I have just ordered the components for a home build server, which was the cheapest, not to mention most silent option available. The components are: Intel Xeon 3.2 Ghz processor (E3-1230). 32 Gig of memory. Intel Micro ATX server motherboard (S1200V3RPL).

Its been a long time since my last update. I apologise for this. It wasnt my intention, it just sort of happened. In the meantime I have tried the CCIE SP lab and didnt pass it, so I am still studying for my next attempt which is comming up shortly. Until then I have booked quite a number of rack hours. Hopefully I will learn from some of the mistakes I have identified.

NTP has always been one of those things I have found tricky to really lab up. Its fairly easy to setup, but verifying whether everything is working as you expect, can be hard because it takes a while to synchronize (and even unsynchronize). In this post I will try and shed some light on the “ntp access-group” command set in Cisco IOS. When you perform a “?” on the command set it looks like the following (on 12.

I have been very quiet when it comes to the topic of SDN (Software Defined Networking). However, these days you can hardly go through your day without spotting an article about it. The reason I have been quiet is pretty simple. I wanted to understand it a bit better before writing anything about it. So what do I have to say about it? Well, in my first rant about it, I will try and clarify a few things that you might be wondering.

Some very smart people have created a new website aimed at the career aspects of the tech world. In time the site should prove to be a valuable tool for anyone trying to land a job in the tech industry. Head on over and check it out at: http://thetechinterview.com/

In this post i would like to explain the usage of the “MPLS VPN Per VRF Label” feature. By default, in each VRF, prefixes are assigned a VPN label, used to identify the route within the VRF itself. This label is the only label that is being looked at by the receiving PE router. In theory, you only need a single label to identify the VRF for the destination prefix, and then you can do an IP lookup to further process the packet.

I just ordered my ticket for DKNOG, which will be happening on March 21st in Copenhagen. Catch me there if you can! www.dknog.dk

Yesterday it was announced that Belkin intends to purchase the Linksys division of Cisco’s hands. I for one, am very happy to see this happen. I think that for Cisco to be really great, it needs to focus on its core competencies, which does not include home networking equipment. The downside of this deal, is probably how much, or rather how little, Belkin is willing to pay for the Linksys brand.

Just wanted to let you know of a good place to go for some IOS-XR training. Head on over to FryGuy’s place: http://www.fryguy.net/2012/11/06/ios-xr-cisco-videos-and-training/

I ran into this error today on an old ASA and i needed a quick fix that didnt involve downgrading any Java versions from the clients servers. I can confirm that by using version 6.1(5)51 of the ASDM works correctly (as noted in the link below). Just a quick tip. Source: http://ciscoccvp.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/asdm-unconnected-sockets-error/

I think the video below is worth going through for a couple of reasons. First off, it explains one networking company’s strategy towards SDN (Software Defined Networking). Its a great academic concept with lots of potential. However there’s no real push for it from customers (at least the customer base of Arista). It also brings up a great point. The internet was built to be able to tolerate failure. That means no central point of administration.

The cat is out of the bag. I am going for my 2nd CCIE. This time its in the Service Provider track. For a while i have felt something missing. And what is missing is a clear cut direction on what i want to learn more about in my professional life. I had a choice to make. Should i simply pick out areas of interest in the networking space and learn what i could about those or should i commit to a certain CCIE track and follow that path of learning.

I think one of the most important things this to happen this week, was a public announcement from the boss of TeliaSonera. He announced that they would in the near future, start to charge people for any VoIP calls they would make through their broadband services. For example, if you are a customer of TeliaSonera and also a Skype user, who wants to keep using this service, you must now pay extra.

There’s news on INE’s Service Provider material. Updated workbooks for the SPv3 will be arriving “soon”. Hopefully that means within a month or two. If you are interested, you can read more and even get a peak into a sample lab. Head on over to INE here: Link

Its been a rough week. I have been finishing up projects and getting rid of loose ends. I have also been giving a couple of lectures on IPv6 (Basically primers) to customers as well as some information on basic failover configuration in IOS. The advent of 3G and low cost gives alot of new opportunities for customers. The rumor mill indicator is a solid green with news of the comming iPad 3.

The picture below should be put into a frame and put onto the desk of everyone in the IT industry. By day, I am a consultant, so I have quite a few stories that relate to this picture. Obviously the picture shows that, at every step in a project there are misunderstandings. In most instances, this is not intentionally, but simply a result of people not understanding where the other party is coming from and heading to.

Below are my findings regarding CAR. Please be advised that this is work in progress. CAR is the ancient way of doing policing. It is not configured using any of the new and fancy MQC style configuration. It is an interface-based command set. CAR is a policer, and as such it is meant to drop packets at some point. CAR can be multi-level, meaning you can police according to different specifications.

A couple of things i have found interesting this week. The first one is that Intel is still in the game for making NIC’s. Even though they are doing some good ones in the server space, this batch seems to be targeted at the entry-level. I dont really know what to make of Intel when it comes to the networking industry. The whole idea of moving more and more features (GPU) on-chip seems like a good idea in many cases and maybe this is just another feature to put on the same slab of silica.

Finally. I have been using Things as my task management program for about 5-6 months. Its been better than not using anything at all, but what has really annoyed me quite heavily is its inability to do “Cloud” synchronization. The only form of synchronization from Things is through your wireless network. And even so, just directly to your Mac, which then syncs to the other devices. I use 4 devices, every day.

I own alot of books. By books, i mean those paper things, that takes up alot of space and for which we chop down trees. Recently, i have been shifting my reading onto my iPad. Its easy to carry around, it holds multiple books and pdf files. On top of that, i find its a great reading device. The fonts are rendered fantastically and they are easy on the eyes to read.

I stumbled across this blog post which i think most will find very interesting. At least i think it contains some ideas that should be followed whenever you make a change to your own or your customers network. Head on over and take a look: http://lamejournal.com/2011/12/07/guide-to-making-changes/  

Update: By most examinations, this seems to be a bug. A clever guy at the Cisco support forums might offer the reason why this happens. Thanks to everyone for clearing this up! (https://supportforums.cisco.com/message/3519430) I was trying someting out the other day concerning EIGRP when i ran into an issue i still cant explain, so i would like to put it out there for scrutiny. It concerns the “variance” command in EIGRP used for unequal-cost load-balancing.

In this post i will shed some light on some spanning-tree info that has been floating around. But also an explanation why i choose a non-obvious answer to an IPexpert question. Specifically 2 things. The first one is the selection of ports and what _exactly_ selects the root port. The second thing is selection of a designated bridge and why the typical phrasing of a question might also be more complex than what you expect.

I am back from our company trip to Dubai. Dubai is a fantastic place. Its my first time in the middle east and it left a great impression. The whole city struck me as a proof-of-concept kind of city. They decided they wanted to do something great and they went ahead and did it. Even better, they did it without much red-tape. From impressive buildings like Burj Khalifa (Wikipedia) being the tallest building in the world to the biggest mall in the world, everything is just impressive.

It seems that everywhere i look, be it on twitter, google+ or my regular reading list of blogs, Openflow comes up alot. What is Openflow? Openflow is an initiative to create a protocol and an API infrastructure to improve overall functionality of your network. I think thats the best way i can put it. I strongly suggest you take a look at Ivan’s posts about Openflow here and here. How will it improve your network?

One of my friends told me about a feature called SPD and whether i knew about it. I didnt so i decided to read a bit more about it. SPD stands for Selective Packet Discard. As the name implies it has something to do with discarding packets. Something that is never good. The documentation i read about it can be found here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps167/products_tech_note09186a008012fb87.shtml It is basically a feature to protect critical data from being dropped due to congestion.

Lately theres been some fuzz in the corners about the need for NAT in the new world order of IPv6. I think its a poor design choice and ill give my reason below. One of the reasons why people seem to feel like they need NAT, is accessibility to IPv4 only content. While i agree this is certainly a concern, it is being rendered less and less important each day as more content providers run dual-stack (or some other form of proxying).

It seems like every day, there are some vulnerability or crack announced on the geek news-outlets. For some reason, the recent publication of an exploit of a flaw in the SSL/TLS implementation in some versions, made me extra curious and it made me think a little harder about this whole security business. My basic premise for thinking about security, is that disclosure is good. Disclosure in a morally fashion is even better.

Flex Links, otherwise known as the devil for your L2 network. In all fairness, lets actually figure out what this feature is used for. The most important thing you need to know is the fact that Flex links disable your spanning-tree process. By that very sentence alone, you should be concerned. I like to call Flex links, backup-links instead, because that is in fact what it is. If you have two uplink ports to your upstream switch as seen in our topology below, you might want to have one link in a standby mode, ready to take over immediately.

I just watched this great lecture from INE on multicast. Well worth sharing:

Using L2 tunnel protocol version 3, you can accomplish what so many scientists are working on. A Wormhole! Granted, this wormhole is just through your L3 network, so it might not raise as many eyebrows, but its still a nifty tool in your toolbox. This will be a fairly short post, but it does give you the ability to see how this works and what you can use it for.

In this small post i want to clarify the use of the “ip verify” command. There has been some confusion on the usage of this command, especially in conjunction with the access-list parameter. I would like to clarify this here. The command is basically a way to mitigate spoofing. You want to make sure that the source of the packet is received from the correct path, meaning interface. First off the topology:

Being a network consultant means getting access to lots of customers using a range of different equipment. One thing thats common for almost all of them, is the fact that the time is not in sync throughout their devices. As you may know, this is a real issue when you are trying to sort out a problem. When you try and explain this to them, they appear to understand the issue.

In this article i will try and setup a very simple example using Cisco IOS IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). As before, a simple topology consisting of 3 routers will suffice. They are configured as follows: Topology for IPS example. R1 will act as our source host. From this machine i will simulate an attacker trying to gain access to R3 through R2. This means R2 will be the device where we will be configuring the IPS functionality.

My take on the Microsoft purchase of Skype. Only last week i attended a mandatory briefing of Lync, Microsofts all-in-all wonder for communicating. Basically its a PBX, IM-server, Video-conferencing, Outlook-Integrator kind of a product. Basically they have taken alot of code from alot of different half-done products and thrown them into one big pile and put alot of marketing money behind it. Going beyond my own personal beliefs about Microsoft, the one big issue i have with Lync was the fact that they dont have a single product for the smartphone market.

Warning: The following is primarily a rant! You might not find it applicable in your situation, or you might simply not care. You have been warned 🙂 Having been a consultant for a while now, i am constantly amazed at how solutions are made up and what is sold simply because it has a buzz-word in its title or description. For example. A salesperson selling a firewall because it has “Intrusion Prevention” listed down the list in its feature-set.

I am going through the detailed blueprint, one item at a time and verifying that there are no surprises. Especially IP services and security is something i havent paid enough attention to in the past. Anyways, there are lots of items on that darn list and going through them all takes alot of time. I have also been messing around with multicast and using BGP for RPF verification. One thing that i got down was from reading a passage in Developing IP multicast networks, namely that the network advertised in BGP is for the SOURCE only.

Link optimization on frame-relay. Using frame-relay, bandwidth is especially a concern. It is possible to optimize this bandwidth in several ways. I will concentrate this post about compression and fragmentation. First off, with compression on frame-relay there several methods of accomplishing this. You can have payload compression, tcp compression and RTP compression. How they are each configured depends on your interface. I will show how all of these are configured using a mix of point-to-point and multipoint interfaces.

As promised, here is a couple of photos of the final layout.   Total Layout   More detailed view   Thats all there is to it 🙂  

So I modified the previous layout a bit. The concern i voiced about the 3640 was enough to make me figure out a way to have that one as the bottom piece of equipment. This is what i ended up with: It worked out pretty well. All the cables were long enough to accomplish the design above. On top of it all i have my remote power switch so i can power it all on/off remotely.

I need to start cabling all of this gear into place. I have made a layout which i think i will try out. The only thing that concerns me is the weight of the 3640 router. Its a heavy baby. As you can see i have most of the routers on top, with only 3 backbone routers in the lower section (16U section). I need to have the Frame Switch pretty centralized as my cables for this are not very long.

I have received the rest of my routers (1841s), I have also received the memory and flash upgrades for them all (256meg memory and 64mb flash). The guy who sold them to me was very helpful and it turned out he had the cables that i needed as well (some Smart-serial to Smart-serial, as well as some DB60 ones). Right now im doing some configuration for my access-server as well as checking out that all the memory and flash modules work as expected.

So i have decided to extend my rack functionality. I have the nessecary switching capacity, but what i need are the “correct” routers. Because of that, i have so far purchased 4x 1841 + a 2811. I still need 3 more before its in order. On top of that i need more memory and flash for them all. I already have 3 backbone routers (2600 series). Its a costly solution, but the only one that wont give me any more trouble where i spend time figuring out where the issue is at, if its with my solution or the underlying hardware/software.

NTP is one of those things that really keeps messing with my head. To break it down, what does it do for us? Simple. It provides the correct time of the day. How does it accomplish this? Now this is where it gets interesting. Lets assume that you have a router which is already synchronized. Since it is already synchronized with a time source, it itself can become a time source.

I want to point everyones attention at this blog post made by Marko over at IPX. Its a good read and i think you will all enjoy it!   http://blog.ipexpert.com/2011/01/19/old-ccie-myths-vlan-1/

Welcome to 2011. I hope that you have had time to enjoy the holidays and all the festivities that come with it. Personally i have been doing alot of work stuff. Moving data centers is no small task when the customers want constant uptime. Of course for some customers this couldnt be done as they dont have fully redundant systems to switch over to. However a large part could be done very fast, but they all needed to be done at night and preferably during the weekends.

The month of December has been crazy for me. A ton of work related stuff has been going on. Our HQ move has taken its toll on everybody. Ive been working through every weekend, putting in some 20 odd hours on some days. Yesterday we pulled the last plug from the old location, having switched over all of our BGP peerings to the new datacenter. Fortunally this went off without a hitch.

My understanding of IRB: I did another Volume 1 lab yesterday. Again i hit my head against the infamous IRB feature. IRB stands for Integrated Routing and Bridging. Below is my understanding of the technology. I could be very wrong about this, so please correct me if i state something completely incorrect. Bridging is switching. Our standard routers dont normally do any bridging, but they can. Basically you can bridge between two interfaces, which on a router, is routed interfaces.

Its been just over two weeks since my lab attempt. I have basically done no studying at all during that time. Time has come to get back in the game. I do have alot of work to do in the near future, but i will still try and do all the studying i can squeeze in. IPexpert volume 3 labs is comming up and im anxious to see how they are.

I had a bit of spare time yesterday, and i stumbled across a great video walkthrough of the Cisco documenation by Internetwork Expert (INE), and i thought i would share it with you in case you hadnt already discovered it: http://www.ine.com/samples/mastering_the_doc-cd.htm   I hope you will enjoy it. I certainly did.

First shot = Failure. So i had my first lab attempt on tuesday the 2nd of November. Boy was it hard 🙂 Unfortunally i didnt pass this time around. I did very well in the troubleshooting part, but the configuration part, got the best of me. There are several reasons for this, but among the top ones is the fact that i didnt follow my own strategy. My strategy was to do what ive done many many times before.

At the bootcamp last week, i was almost out of reach from my lab. Even though i just got the remote power controller, the network at both the conference place as well as the hotel (especially the hotel!) was pretty bad. Attached is a screenshot of what sort of latency i was dealing with at the hotel: Latency Madness   This means im trying to catch up on Volume 2 labs i was planning to do while there.

This was all written yesterday 🙂 Airport fun! So right now (im sitting in London Stansted Airport after having attended the last of Narbiks bootcamp. Its going to be good to get home to the girlfriend and my puppy. He had a guest with him this time around. Rolf Schärer. The guy is a tripple CCIE (R&S, SP and Storage). Very knowledgeable and nice guy. If you have business in and around the Swiss nation, he is a safe bet when it comes to Cisco technologies.

I wanted to point your attention to gns3vault.com. Alot of students use GNS3 (front end for dynamips) to do alot of their lab work. Rene Molenaar created this site, which is basically a site with free labs that you can download and practice on. A great idea! Go there and give him a shoutout and maybe contribute with some labs.

Im back from vacation. I can now with convinction state that hotels in Spain are not up to par with other places. I have been to Spain twice now, and they NEVER have an internet connection in the rooms. You had Wifi in the lobby, 2€ for an hour, and it barely worked. Hence i could not work on my home rack at all. This meant i spent only a few hours to watch Video On Demand.

Awesome. Got alot of EEM ground covered today. Seems like a very powerful scripting engine that stands out, by having the ability to be triggered under certain circumstances. Lets check out an example using the topology below: EEM Topology R1 is connected to an ethernet segment. Imagine that on this ethernet segment we have multiple things running. In order to test things out, imagine that R2 is our NMS.

I have started doing IPexpert Vol 1. technology labs. They are pretty challeging. They make you think out of the box. Almost none of it is vanilla configuration. I dont know how closely these labs reflect the real one. Ofcourse these are Vol. 1 labs, but what i mean by it, is especially the wording. Maybe its just me. If you get a task stating you have to do something, what i find hard, is to allow myself to implement any special solution that comes to mind, even though it seems radical.

Woke up early this morning to get a head-start on the Video-on-Demand courses. I do it by looking at the PDF’s thats covered on each configuration section, and try and replicate the topology as well as solving all the tasks. Afterwards i follow along the video and check out if my solution matches, and notes down if theres other ways to perform the same thing. Its very good training to do it that way i think.

Update 11-08-2010: I can now create RMON alarms and events. It seems the command set for RMON is pretty limited. Not much around the net as to how deep to go into this. Hope its enough. I just looked over the detailed blueprint which is authored by cisco. It had checkmarks, which i used to mark down things i knew i could configure, as well as things i really need more training in.

Okay these are some really cool maps if you are into networking (and i know you are): http://www.cablemap.info/ http://www.telegeography.com/product-info/map_cable/index.php They show submarine communications cables. What a job to lay down those suckers. I followed the PPC-1 installation a while back. Its the new submarine cable going into Australia. It had its own blog, with info and pictures. Very interesting. Also, to find out about the history of submarine cables, goto http://en.

I wanted to take the opportunity to pitch in on the discussion thats presented in this article by Ivan Pepelnjak: http://blog.ioshints.info/2010/07/p2p-traffic-is-bad-for-network.html with the headline of “P2P traffic is bad for the network”. I agree with the headline… Somewhat… P2P is bad for the network, in the sense that it causes congestion and because of that, it makes using the net a bad experience for everyone else. But then again, it seems like theres a real need for P2P traffic (disregarding the entire illegal download discussion).

I have vented about this topic before and will do so once again. I am doing this because i believe its very important. Students who are studying for Cisco exams or engineers who are trying to lab up a technology before deploying it, have found Dynamips and used Cisco hardware very useful in the past. However, with the new exam requirements and the new licensing methods for IOS, these tools will not be available to you in the future.

Troubleshooting. An artform in itself. I have been doing trouble-shooting labs for the last week and its not going the way i want it to. In all fairness, its very good practice! having all the components in one lab, with all sorts of technologies interconnected really makes life interesting. The most valuable thing i have learned so far, is to calm down and not rush into a “maybe-this-works” sort of solution.

Im trying out a new design layout. Its not quite finished yet, need some tweaks here and there, but im hoping it will be a bit easier to read my posts in the future. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Anyone who has been following Cisco products recently (last year or so), must have noticed Cisco’s new products. This includes the Flip video recorder as well as the new tablet that has just been announced. On top of that, adding the Linksys brand to their portfolio a couple of years ago, proves they are going in a completely different direction than previously. Cisco has always been viewed as a top notch brand by their customers.

I am in the process of figuring out how to get to another bootcamp (Narbik). Unfortunally alot of classes in Europe have been cancelled due to lack of students. This pretty much leaves me with going to the US at some point. I want the date/bootcamp confirmed before i order plane tickets/hotel and whatnot. Hopefully this can be worked out soon. I have finished all of the labs in both volume 1 and volume 2.

A a couple links that you guys mind find good: [http://prakashkalsaria.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/pe-ce.jpg ][1] http://lovemytool.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc First one is a great overview of some BGP options. The second one is a page with a list of videos of Sharkfest. All things wireshark it would appear 🙂

My apologies for the huge lack of content lately. I have been insanely busy with work along with doing lots of labs. Especially IPv6 labs was challenging. I have done 50% of a blog post about my trials with this beast. The day before yesterday i started on one of my worst enemies, namely Multicasting. Even the very name of it scares me. It shouldnt be like that, so im working on facing my fears.

I wanted to take some time to write up something about the cost of doing the CCIE track. This is prompted by some recent events in the CCIE training community and some discussion on twitter about studying in an economic downturn. Now, there are a couple of different ways of thinking about this. I recognize them all, and see their validity, but i will pitch in on my thoughts about it.

New technology i just learned about! Its called PIPQ, and stands for PVC Interface Priority Queueing. As the name implies, its a Queueing method, and its only for frame-relay. It basically functions in the same way as a PQ scheme, in that it has 4 queues, high, medium, normal and low. Where it differs is that instead of putting packets into each queue, you “put PVC’s” into each queue, or rather, you designate into which queue this specific PVC should belong to.

Im pretty much back at my lab practice again. Doing Narbik’s labs. Last 5-6 labs is all about frame-relay, including FRTS, PIPQ (Which i never encountered before), fragmentation and compression. All good stuff. As someone on twitter mentioned, its really amazing that frame-relay is still on the lab exam. You would think that they would remove that topic and introduce some more MPLS. However, i guess that frame-relay is a good topic to do exam tasks as there are soo many small details.

Just finished a VERY busy day at work. Virus attack at a customer site + a complete FTP server change. Anyways. I wanted to let you know of a book i just started which i think will come in handy in the lab. Its Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols. A Cisco Press book. So far ive just read the introductory chapters as well as a primer on RIP. I think its a book i will read almost cover to cover (skipping IGRP and ISIS chapters) since it might provide some usefull insight into border-line

This just in, well not really, as the news is a couple of days old. The dreaded OEQ for the R&S lab exam is now a thing of the past. The news created alot of buzz on the forums, twitter and facebook. It would seem that alot of people have really been fearing these questions. My opinion on these, as its always been, is that it was a flaky idea to begin with.

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I have a few minutes this morning that i want to use to clarify a special BGP feature which i had misunderstood until a few days ago. This has to do with the aggregate-address that you use to create a summary address. One of its many options includes the “advertise-map” parameter. Previously i was under the impression that it functioned in the same manner as the advertise-map thats used when selecting what routes to advertise based on conditions (exist and non-exist maps).

Long time since last post. There are reasons for that. First of is labs. Ive been doing quite alot of labs. I finished Narbik’s Vol 1 workbook. All good stuff, and I learned alot of material that was not covered in the written blueprint. Alot of emphasis on IP SLA, which i really like. It provides a really good tool in your networking toolbox. Second is that work has taken its toll.

In my continued quest through BGP i ran into a couple of things which i wanted to share my thoughts about. All of them has to do with a non-direct peering between BGP peers. Originally the BGP protocol was designed to be run between directly connected routers. Then came along these busy times where we might want to have two connections, for redundancy and load-balacing purposes. We also want to have a single peering only.

Lately I have been having a motivational down-period. I was doing alot of labs all evening/night and I was burned out. So I have been enjoying easter with family and girlfriend. It has been very nice. However, im starting to feel the urge of going back to the labs again which is good. Hopefully i will start tonight or tomorrow again. I have a post regarding BGP in my draft section which I hope to share with you guys tomorrow as well.

Im learning something new at work almost every day. We do alot of voice installations, some directly for the customer, others we host. Voice has always been a strange world to me, and it still is. Basically it boils down to the fact that it doesnt interest me what so ever. As said, I am learning though. I need to know my way around the voice world to some extent to be better at my job, and to be a better all-round engineer.

I want to point your attention to a great article right here: ardenpackeer.com, good stuff, deffinately worth the read. I am looking this up today, as i ran into it last night doing more BGP labs. Again, just to re-iterate. The feature gives you the ability of taking a network, thats advertised by a certain source, and inject a more specific route of this network into the BGP table (and then to the routing table).

I wanted to share a very interesting tidbit i figured out the hard way. Again, its about NSSA areas in OSPF. When redistributing a route into an NSSA area, how is the forwarding address chosen? Some say the lowest IP address of any loopback interfaces thats advertised into the NSSA area. Others say the highest. Which one is correct? The answer is suprisingly: Neither! The question then becomes, how DOES it choose it?

I havent been very good at updating my blog lately. The reason for this is that i have been really focused on doing labs. Im still doing Narbik’s labs. They are great! They really make you think about what you are doing and contains the nasty 007 tricks 🙂 There’s also been some work pressure going on. Especially one client needed a pretty big network change this week, so we had to pull an all nighter.

Cool useful functionality this time around. Even though it has little to do with CCIE (in the way i have not encountered it on any blueprint :)), i was asked to implement a functionality to make sure we always had the most recent configuration from our routers. The archive functionality hits right on the spot, and with more features than i expected it to. Basically what it provides is the capability to store your configuration file to an external target whenever you perform a change and write it to your startup-config.

I wanted to give a status update on my study progress as it stands on February 28th 2010. At the moment im still hitting Narbik labs. There are alot of good ones, and i havent even hit the troubleshooting labs yet. This weekend has completely wasted though. Mainly because of my birthday this friday, and moving my girlfriend back in with me (we had two appartments for her to goto school in a different city).

First off, thanks to the two sites below, i finally learned what this beast was about. Thanks guys! Human Modem CCIE Candidate I got around to play with fallback bridging yesterday. I want to summarize its important points here. To understand it in the first place, it helps to give some information on why its needed. In using routed protocols, such as IP, we have the possibility of going across VLAN boundaries by using ip routing between vlan interfaces.

I had a very long day at work yesterday, but still felt like doing a lab when i got home. My next lab was about fallback-bridging. Yet another topic i know nothing about 🙂 So today/tonights plan calls for figuring this technology out. It doesnt seem overly complicated to configure, but its more of a task to understand the technology. I’ve collected a few resources that im going to go through tonight, here they are:

Yesterday evening I was playing around some more with SNMP and sending different traps. I was mainly playing around with my 3560 switches. They were running IOS 12.2(35)SE1 (IPServices). What struck me as odd was the behavior when configuring multiple snmp hosts. Even though i configured only some traps to be sent to certain hosts, when it would generate any one of them, it would send out snmp traps to all hosts!

I was just playing around with some switching labs. As i was doing this, i ran into configuring SNMP, sending traps when mac-addresses was added/removed, and all sorts of other things. I could (as in the lab) just set the IP address of the NMS (Network Management System), but i wanted to actually make sure that these were being picked up correctly by an NMS. I scoured the net, trying to find some sort of application (that was free, as i only wanted it for this purpose).

I thought i would write a bit about my bootcamp last week. Here’s what I have come up with. I will update this as more thoughts flow into my head 🙂 Day one at Narbik’s bootcamp: —————————– What an eye opener. This guy has his stuff under control! We started out with switching topics. Configured all sorts of things. We were told that 60% would be configuration and hands on stuff, while the remaining 40% would be theory (chalk talk).

Im done packing for Narbiks bootcamp next week. I will be flying out tomorrow morning and probably be at the hotel at around 1ish in the afternoon. I have brought my training clothes, and hopefully ill get to utilize the hotel gym facilities during the day. I also have about 20 pages left of the volume II workbook, which ill do remote on my home lab. These are actually the hardest labs so far.

More Narbik Labs. I have arrived at the BGP section, and its very good. It touches on some more obscure features that are really useful. One of the things i ran into was the use of advertise-maps, exist-maps and non-exist maps. I have used these before, but very briefly. I also have notes on the use of the mentioned maps, but its one of those things that if you dont use it, you forget it.

Making up a list of things i need to bring for the bootcamp. I finally want to try and be a bit more organized regarding this on this trip. I thought id do that best by starting writing all the things i think i will need straight away, and then go back and forth on the list and add things as i saw fit. Turns out that just doing this today, turned up 35 things already 🙂

Last night i was doing some Vol.2 Narbik Labs. I was supposed to filter some OSPF routes entering the routing table on a certain router. I chose to use an extended access-list because, well, just because i could. The command i wanted to use, was the router-config mode command “distribute-list”. A bit of info on the distribute-list command. This command is used to filter routes in the routing protocol. You can filter routes comming in from a certain interface, routes going out a certain interface (in some protocols), and

Welcome back to part 3 about OSPF and external routes. In this post I will focus on type 7 LSA’s. These are LSA’s thats created within an NSSA area. An NSSA area is, as you may know, an area which is meant as a stub area (no type 4 and 5’s), but will still allow for external routes to be introduced in the area. Instead of having type 5’s, which is not allowed in a stub area, it is allowed to have a special type of LSA called a type 7 LSA.

Welcome back to the 2nd post about OSPF and external routes. Last time we spoke of OSPF and how it behaves in regard of external routes in a single “normal” area. By normal, it implies an area that accepts all types of LSA’s. For the sake of completeness, I want to create the same scenario, but this time, the same route is redistributed into two different regular areas. This will make it apparent to you which LSA/route will be prefered under a couple of different circumstances.

I want to create some posts about the actual behavior of OSPF in regards to external routes in different areas and how everything behaves. It might take more than a few posts, but I hope you’ll keep reading them 🙂 The first one, is about redistributing external routes into a normal OSPF area. A “normal” OSPF area is an area which allows all kinds of LSA’s. This means we can have an external source in this area.

I have been working on some OSPF scenarios lately. These was sparked by a post by Joe Astorino @ IPexpert. They are about the use of the forwarding address in Type 5 LSA’s generated by an ABR because of a Type 7 LSA in an NSSA area. Alot of the questions i had in regard to the blog post, was that I couldnt recreate the scenarios at all. Turns out the whole thing was a bit tilted in how an ABR elected which ASBR to pick for the forwarding address.

The link below is an excellent read from INE that you should really take the time to read. I am working on a post about the OSPF forwarding address, as well as some MPLS stuff. Stay tuned 🙂 I just wanted to get the link out there. http://blog.internetworkexpert.com/2009/03/22/how-to-study/

The new CCIE lab version is in effect. Called version 4. The first guy on OSL (Online Study List) has been through it, and there’s certainly some changes. First up, is the annoying OEQ (Open Ended Questions), these were on the retired version 3 as well. Lots of people have issues with them, so I wont bother commenting on them other than saying they scare me too 🙂 Second is the trouble-shooting section.

This small post will be about a little feature called “views”. This feature is used to create a sort of profile, for which you could have a certain user do certain things. As you might know, the only way to do this previously was to use the priviledge level command. This command would in effect set the command to be available at a certain priviledge level. This can be very cumbersome to maintain, especially if you work in a large enterprise environment or a service provider.

I want to show the behavior of the uRPF feature. Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding. Basically this is a security feature, to prevent spoofed source IP address (very basic). Its function is to prevent a router from processing a packet comming from an unknown source/wrong interface. So there are two modes of uRPF: Loose and Strict. Loose Mode: This mode says, that as long as we have a route to the source IP address, its okay to route/process this packet.

The role of the designated router has been bothering me every now and again. I always end up forgetting its role, where its present, and how its elected. So i thought i would post some info on it, maybe to keep my own mind fresh 🙂 In any lan environment, a designated router will be elected by PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast). Its role is to handle joins in a sparse-mode environment, and if IGMP version 1 is used, to elect the querier of the lan.

This topic has been bothering me for a while actually. In the last couple of years we have seen a wave of so called “social networking” sites. Those are sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. What these sites are supposed to bring you is a sense of being closer connected to your friends, family and peers. Noone can argue that this goal has not been reached, but i keep asking myself, at what cost?

I have just landed a new job. It is a networking company, doing alot of security, ip telephony and general network consulting. The company can be found here. It is called NetIP. The company is located about 30km from where I live, so a little drive in each direction is nessecary. I will start Thursday the 1st of October. I am looking forward to it. My last day at the previous job was yesterday, and it went by okay.

Its been a while, and for that im sorry. I have been very busy watching VOD (Video On Demand) classes from IPexpert. Scott Morris has done these videos, and he is pretty good at it in my opinion. There are alot of new stuff as well. Things such as Multilink Frame-relay (FRF.16) and PPP over frame-relay. IRB (Integrated Routing and Bridging) was also new for me. Basically you can extend your L2 over a L3 ip routed network.

So a simple concept right? Tunnel your L2 protocols through a switched network? I agree, but as usual, i put more complication into it. Basically a VOD from IPexpert on L2protoco-tunnel used to create a trunk connection. In the video it is shown that you can create a trunk by using a l2protocol-tunnel (STP in particular). Through extensive testing and discussion on OSL, this is possible, but you will only get the native-vlan traffic through.

I am getting used to hearing Scott Morris’s voice by now 🙂 I am doing Video On Demand classes at the moment. Im starting from the beginning and going through them one by one. Lots of new things to learn and study. Today for example i learned about “real” bridging. Since its not on any blueprint for CCNA, CCNP or even CCIE R&S, its not something ive come across before. It is a pretty cool feature.

The lack of posts recently has its cause. I have been playing around with a screencast. The problem boils down to compressing the video somehow. I made a recording, and unfortunally it was recorded in a too good of a quality, resulting in a pretty big filesize (~300Mb). I then tried several (read: ALOT) of different tools to somehow compress it. I have still to figure it out. But anyways, I uploaded it to youtube because i didnt know where else to put it.

Here is the brainstorm about the preparation on the CCIE lab I have come up with so far. Remember that this is no final list or any “magic pill” of any sorts, it is just some thoughts I have been having. Update: _Keith O’Rouke pointed out to me that the DocCD is my new best friend. I need to master it completely, and he is 100% right, therefor it is now added to my list.

Intro: Authentication is a critical part of administrating your network devices. For the longest time, i know for a fact that alot of companies use a simple authentication mechanism. Namely a either a line password, or at best local user database authentication. The inherent problem of these is that they are static entries, and on top of that, you have to manually do it on all the devices in your network.

One of my last tasks at work before I stop, is to create a new switched network for a location in Estonia. It will be a 10 switch network. The company is reusing two 3560 switches which I still need to receive. However, I got 8 new switches today, all 2960 switches, one of them being a 2960G switch, which is a very nice L2 switch. I just finished setting them up on my desk so I can start configuring them.

Lately I havent been keeping up my chores on the blog. Theres a good reason for this. I have really been studying hard to do the written exam again. Done lots of practice tests, a lot of technology focused labs on especially some edge areas where I wasnt 100% sure of things. And especially a lot of Cisco documentation. Every time I reached a snag I looked up the documentation from Cisco and read through what it was supposed to do and how.

Right now Im working on security topics! This is by FAR my weakest area according to all the tests. I am approaching this from the ground up. Reading exam certification guide. Taking notes. Try it out on the lab. All the things i get wrong, i read whitepapers/documentation on. This will hopefully get down alot of concepts that i tend to screw up. On some security points I do have the concepts down, but the details run me over when a scenario is presented.

If you are into the world of CCIE stuff, you know that both the written and the lab exams will change very shortly. Alot of emphasis will be put onto the task of troubleshooting networks. From the onset this seems like a tricky part to teach anyone, and it is. One company, even how many smart people they hire, can only think up amount of troubleshooting networks and write documentation for them and so on.

Been a few days since my last post. During that time, I have taken quite a few practice tests to gauge where im at. I am also slowly progressing through the Exam Guide. Also, in the near future im switching over to a new hosting service. Need some features which wordpress doesnt allow me to use, such as advertising. I got a friend in germany who has a colocated server which he will provide some access to.

So I saw a post over at Ioshints about bandwidth, how we, as consumers come to expect a certain bandwidth, and how ISP’s are dealing with these issues. It is a fact that ISP’s greatly oversubscribe their networks, and keep selling more access-lines with an even greater bandwidth cap than ever before. So lets explore some of the factors in this bandwidth revolution! The (very) near future: New types of network devices and services is one of the reasons why people need more bandwidth.

Even though my next post was going to be about some enhancements to STP, I found this little nugget about OSPF behavior, that I thought I would share with everyone. As we know OSPF, when crossing an area boundary, the ABR (Area Border Router), will gather type 1 (router and its links) and type 2 (network information provided by the DR on a transit network) and form a type 3 LSA, which is basically a boiled down version of the two other types of LSA’s.

This is the 2nd post about 802.1D, also known as spanning-tree. In the previous post, I explained alot of functionality behind the selection of ports on both root bridges as well as non-root bridges. (Remember a switch is a bridge). In this post, I want to show some examples on what happens in certain scenarios, and how STP reconverges when one of these events occur. Lets start out with our topology again:

Ive spent the last couple of days playing around with the traditional Spanning-tree protocol (802.1D), which has been used for many years, but is pretty slow to converge. As most of you know, Spanning-tree protocol (STP), is used to build a loop-free L2 topology. This is done to avoid bridging loops, where your frames gets sent around and around endlessly. STP does this by assigning ports a certain role and a state.

I failed my first attempt at the CCIE written exam this thursday… It really sucks. I was very close to passing it, but unfortunally it didnt happen. I need alot more practice questions to get a “feel” of whats being asked. Also, protocol mechanics need to be practiced some more. I still think I know all the stuff. I just need to “get it all together” if you know what i mean.

I am just watching the video of the google wave application. It is really impressive what you can do with the modern web technologies. One thing that really shines through is the real-time updating. This is a really cool technology that I can envision a bright future. If developers embrace this, and extends it, it can really be a very powerfull tool that will rival microsoft’s version, namely sharepoint, and its integration with different microsoft products.

Been spending the last few days doing some leg-work on understanding different ACL’s to match different networks most effeciently. Alot of posting on Online-Study List on how to do this, all very valuable. Tyson Scott from IPexpert created a PDF file that was posted, and will also be made available from IPexpert.com in the member section. It gives some good examples of the binary math behind it all. Also, I can highly recommended a free vLecture from IPexpert on this topic, it goes through some details on how it all fits together.

Great news for all you europeans! It would seem that IPexpert is looking into creating classes on european soil. This would be really great to cut down on costs and travel time to attend IPexpert led instructor training. I hope we can get together about 10-ish people that wish to attend these classes. I for one would be one of them. Are anyone else interested? please let me know!

So this is the 2nd part on how PIM-SM operates. Last time I showed how the initial RPT (shared tree) was constructed, and how data would flow from the source to the receiver. This time, I want to show you how the optimization technique in SM actually works. Lets start out with how our traffic flow looked like after the shared tree was constructured: From this, the blue line represents the SPT build from the RP toward the source.

I knew it would be tricky before I even started with the multicast section, but not this hard 🙂 So I wrote about PIM-DM and its flooding behavior, and how it would make sure data was flowing from the source to the receivers. I will try to give some information about PIM-SM and also some further information on IGMP. First of, lets define what protocols handles what: IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol).

So Brandon Carroll’s quest to do the Routing and Switching certification is scheduled to take 90’s days. I think he is very gifted and got the right stuff to do it (he’s a security CCIE). What came to mind, was this hypothesis: If he can do it in 90 days, that must mean that the bulk of all CCIE certifications will be the same. My reason for saying this? glad you asked.

I am really wondering whats up with google’s services lately. I have been having huge issues getting my mail. It times out several times, and then all of a sudden it appears, and other times it logs me out. Sometimes I have to periodically refresh. The same issues have been occuring with my Google calendar, time outs, wont show my girlfriends calendar, so on and so forth. I know they run a huge server park but still…

Ive started on the Developing IP Multicast Networks book from Beau Williamson. This book is apparently “the” book on multicasting, so I hope it will help me out with this weak area of mine. So far ive read about DVMRP which is not on the blueprint, but it sounded like it would be a good help to understanding PIM modes, which are on the blueprint, so I decided to go through it anyways.

I am almost done with the Internet Routing Architectures book, and its a great book!! You really get to understand why BGP is the way it is. Where IGP’s as we know them concentrate on fast convergence, BGP is all about 2 things: stability and policies. The policy part, comes from the fact that you want to have a protocol that will allow multiple ISP’s and other large enterprises to dictate dictate how traffic should flow and tweak it to just the exact pattern they want it.

So even though im looking over my journal, and i am doing about 1,5 – 2 hours studying each day, I feel like im lacking the discipline to really make a dent in the thing called CCIE Written. I have not been using google calendar like i should, and it is really bumming me out. I would like to have two 50 mins reading sessions a day, and time to write down my notes at the end of the day.

So after learning that im not employed after september, I am on the market for a new laptop. This new laptop will be my primary machine, as I very rarely boot up my stationary computer. It should be able to handle quite alot. Right now I have two candidates which are very appealing in their own way: 1) Lenovo W500, This is a really nice laptop with a 15″ screen with a native resolution of 1920×1080 which makes it able to play full HD 🙂 It would be really nice with a screen like this for running multiple things like i always do.

The new blueprint is out for all to see. Its version 4, and includes some interesting things. Alot of people have already analysed it in quite some detail. The two things thats most obvious to me, is the emphasis on MPLS as more and more dominant technology. VRF’s are explored in more detail. The second, and more disturbing in my opinion is the Troubleshooting section. I am really curious how they plan to test this while at the same time also being exact in the answer they (cisco) want.

As the topic implies, I will be writing about a few things regarding shaping and policing. Now these are two really hard-to-understand topics for me, but they are also very usefull. To understand what they do, and the difference between them, lets define them as such: Shaping delays packets to achive the target bitrate. Policing either drops packets, or remarks them as lower priority. When speaking of these two technologies, we need to define some terms which are used very often:

Im at the policing and shaping section of the exam certification guide, and its very hardcore stuff in my opinion. Just finished the section on 3550 and 3560 ingress/egress queuing and scheduling methods. Wow, thats really something i gotta get my head around. One thing to note, is the fact that the switches use an internal DSCP value to map to all CoS values. Another is how the queues work in each switch model.

Im somewhat in the middle of the CCIE exam certification guide, and still learning alot. I am putting down the framework for more detailed examination of technologies. I have a couple of books on my reading list after this to solidify the knowledge with more in-depth details. Also, quite a few labs has turned up details, easily missed. Especially regarding summarization, and how it behaves under different circumstances. A change in my study arsenal has occured.

I am doing alot of technology focused labs, and I always learn something new, which is really good. For example, I was studying the effects of autosummarization with RIP and EIGRP. A few things cropped up. RIP will autosummarize routes it receives from other neighbors, where as EIGRP will only summarize those, if it has a locally connected network of the same major net, and it is included in a network statement.

Im done with my first reading of Routing TCP/IP volume 1. All in all a great book, with lots of information about the various IGP’s. I skipped the IS-IS part simply because its not part of the R&S written blueprint. I made quite a few notes about each chapter along the way, which I am sure will come in handy when reviewing/troubleshooting material. Unfortunally I lost my account at flashcarddb.com, so I had to create a new one.

So I broke down and bought the IPexpert Blended Learning Solution the day before yesterday. I got great advice very fast from the people there, and they were very nice. Been looking over the workbooks, they seem really good and challenging 🙂 As I have written before, I will take my time and learn as much as I possibly can, so I wont even start those labs until I have a better understanding of the entire scope of this whole CCIE buisness, which in other words means alot more reading and understanding of things and passing the written exam.

Im watching some free vLectures from IPexpert here, the one im watching is the one about Spanning-Tree. Its pretty good so far. I do hope however, that their video-on-demand products are alot better quality. Im still waiting to take the plunge and buy their BLS (Blended Learning Solution) until I know where I stand both financially and knowledge wise (written). Anyways, its good information/knowledge, by very smart people, so I suggest you head over there and check it out!

So im finishing up some troubleshooting exercises in Routing TCP/IP. They are mainly about the metrics used by EIGPR. Here’s a review of the functionality of EIGRP and how it chooses the best path to a destination. First of, EIGRP is an Enhancement of the proprietary IGRP protocol, which is almost but phased out by now. EIGRP is still a distance vector protocol, since it routes by rumor. Each router does not have a full view of the entire network topology and can therefor not base any decision on

At the bottom of this post is a link to a small article by Jared over at IPexpert about the books he recommends for the CCIE written exam. Anyone who looked at the recommended book list from Cisco is blown away. I believe theres 21 books on that list, most of which, I suspect is no less than 600 pages. Jareds list is only one third of that. This is a guy with 3x CCIE’s under his belt, so I take his words as the definite truth :

So im reading about EIGRP’s DUAL algorithm, and how it works, and MAN, its confusing. After the example in Routing TCP/IP, even they mention it might require several readings. Basically it boils down to the fact if a router being notified of a bad link has a feasible successor or not. If it doesnt, it goes into an active state and sends out queries to all of its neighbors. It will stay in active until it has received a reply from all of its neighbors it has queried.

I wanted to post a link to a great site which I have started using called flashcarddb.com, what it does is pretty simple, but it does its job in a slick fashion. There is a system called the leitner system, which in all its simplicity is making you remember things by repeating them in periods with different intervals. If you miss a question, it is scheduled to be repeated more often, until you get it right every time.

Im having some “fun” with static routes. Its an okay topology, 4 routers connected. The task asked for having some floating static routes, along with some load-balancing routes. Since they are CEF based, it will be load-shared by default to destination load sharing. Note to self: if incomming interface is CEF, what is the output switching method going to be? — Thats right, CEF. One thing that strike’s me, is the complexity of static routes in a relatively small network.

So like many others finishing their CCNP’s, ive been looking at the CCIE R&S track. There are two obstacles to become one of the prestigious ones with CCIE digits. One is the written exam, and the second is the lab exam. Of these two, the lab exam seems to be the big one of the two. I would like to add a third however. That one is the study path to passing the other two.

So yesterday I setup a BGP scenario which you can see below: I am doing mutual redistribution on both R1 and R3, between BGP and EIGRP. I am advertising a couple of routes from R4 (AS 65001) to R1 (AS 65000). What I expect to happen is for R1 to learn those routes via eBGP (Administrative distance of 20). It would then redistribute them into the EIGRP process where R3 would learn them with an administrative distance of 170 (EIGRP external routes).

Thought I would share some lab pictures:

I just emptied my shopping basket on amazon again. This means I ordered what was in it 🙂 I got some CCIE books, but this doesnt mean anything except I am interested in whats in them. Also got a few other non-technical books. Among other things I ordered Brian Tracy’s book: Goals! which I saw mentioned on Chris Bryants site. Maybe I can pick up a few tips and tricks. Also got a book on anxiety and how to combat it without the use of drugs.

I am finally done. ONT was passed today, and with a pretty good score as well. I am very happy. Now it is time for some relaxing, and get on with my training schedule. I really wish we had a testing center somewhere closer that was actually worth going to. It is a 2 hour drive for me to goto each exam, which I think is a long time. I really want to extend my home lab a bit, to practice and keep up the knowledge levels, and generally to slam out my weak areas.

I am in the process of reviewing and labbing from the lab portfolio. I need to have the verification commands down, so I can troubleshoot different QoS scenarios. I find it very hard to do much configuration though. Also, the wireless section is kind of hard to get good hands-on experience with since I dont have access to any WCS (Wireless Control System). At work, we only have WLC (Wireless Lan Controllers) that I can get some practical hands-on experience with.

I just purchased a Linksys USB ethernet adapter to try out with Gnu/Linux. I have tried it with both 32 and 64bit, and it works like a charm. It was just an experiment to see how I could create a box with a large density of LAN ports. Since im on a budget and only have dual NIC’s available, I was looking at different motherboards with lots of LAN ports. Only two I could find were Asus P5Q Premium and Gigabyte DQ6, which both had 4 onboard LAN ports.

So I am almost done with the wireless section, but alot of things still needs to click in, especially regarding the security aspect of it all. Some more reading on that is needed next. QoS in wireless is done by basically lowering the back-off time in CSMA/CA for higher priority traffic. The Wifi Alliance released an interim solution based on 4 categories. Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze. Platinum is used for voice, Gold for video, Silver is best effort, and Bronze is “background” stuff, I guess thats your typical P2P applications along with random non-categorized stuff.

I am finishing up on chapters regarding WRED and LFI. WRED is a congestion avoidance mechanism. What that means, is that when congestion occurs, you try and avoid filling up the buffers completely by dropping some packets. Normally the standard queueing for fast interfaces (>E1) is FIFO, with the congestion avoidance of tail dropping. That means whenever the buffers are full, any new packets to the queue, gets dropped. This has a nasty habbit of producing TCP synchronization.

So im studying about congestion management, namely the use of queuing and the different discplines of queuing. FIFO = First In First Out. This is a straight forward queue which doesnt take any priority, delay or bandwidth into account. This is the default on Cisco equipment for interfaces > 2.048 Mbps (E1 lines or slower). RR = A simple Round Robin method of queuing. Makes a certain amount of queues, and uses round robin among them.

So today I have spent some time reading up on voip codecs, and how to calculate bandwidth requirements for a single call with a certain codec. Take for example. G.711 (PCM), which is uncompressed voice data. Its specification says 64kbps raw data output from the codec. We want to use a packetization period of 20ms. That means two digital voice samples pr. voip packet. Calculation: ( 64000 * ( 20/1000 ) )/8 = 160 bytes in our voip packet.

So today I watched some material on nbar (Network Based Application Recognition), which is a feature originally used for classification of data, used in QoS to mark packets. It uses very deep packet inspection, to figure out what data is being transfered over the network. It goes up to Layer 7 to figure out what is truly being transfered. This is especially useful for many new applications which uses protocol tunneling to “get through” a firewall.

So, so far ONT seems alot like its brother-acronym QoS. Watched a few videos today, solidifying knowledge from BCMSN about CoS only being for L2 trunk links and ToS/DSCP being for Layer 3. Figured out the DE bit provides a somewhat rudimentary QoS for frame-relay. Throw away, or dont :). It is used when CIR (Commited Information Rate) is in effect. You can basically use it to determine on your own which packets to be Discard Eligible or not.

As reported on cciepursuit, cisco has announced changes to both the lab and written parts of the CCIE certification. On the written, the normal “style” of cisco exams will take place, where you cant go back and forth between questions, and no review. On the lab, some questions will need answering, which will take a certain amount of time. This is done to verify the CCIE candidate to verify the correct skillset in order for CCIE certification.

I skimmed over the ONT blueprint, and it sure seems like alot of voice. I am not quite sure howcome theres that much voice material on there. It bothers me quite frankly, because I dont find the voice part particularly interesting. But alas, I digress, theres just one way to the CCNP, and thats through ONT. I need to come up with a good study plan, to take into account my anxiety.

I just passed ISCW. Im really glad this one is over with. But I have ALOT of reviewing for the material in this one, when i finish the rest of the CCNP track. I could especially feel that not having access to the FW and IPS parts really hurt me. Unfortunally I cant afford any of the very pricy IOS images, for any of my devices, that will support the FW and IPS feature set.

Okay, Xmas is over and so is new years as Im writing this. Im behind regular postings, I know, which is frustrating. I am done with the preliminary reading and lab work for ISCW, but I dont feel prepared for it at all. Its even worse than it was for BCMSN. I think the lack of an official study guide really got me off track. I will have to investigate further how to create a study plan on the topics on the blueprint and then come to a full understanding and assurance I got the topics down.

So today I have read a couple of more chapters about IPSec and GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation). I have also watched quite alot of CBT on IPSec VPN’s, which really helped clarify somethings. But I also really think its a hard topic to get to grips with, especially since you only get “half of the story”. The rest is most likely left out to “protect” the CCSP track, and all the stuff thats going on in that track.

Im studying IPSec VPN’s at the moment. There’s alot of terms, protocols and exchanges taking place, and they all use names thats really hard to tie together with what they are doing 🙂 Isakmp for example, what does that do? well, it stands for Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol. Its the first phase of the IKE (Internet Key Exchange). Basically its sets up a baseline (encryption, hashing (authentication), Key-material, and Diffie-Hellman group), for management traffic.

So I just started work toward the ISCW. The lab book for this is huge, so I think its going to be alot of lab work, and alot of lookups on Cisco’s doc site for further information. My reason for this thinking is the lack of a self-study guide for the ISCW exam. Its a shame really, since Ive enjoyed the self-study guides so far. Anyways, im on the exam certification guide, and will read some functional chapters (where you actually get into configuring some stuff).

Thankfully I passed BCMSN. Thank god. It was driving me nuts. Passed with an 864, which im satisfied with. I am thinking about my study technique for the ISCW. I need to see if I can structure it somewhat better than BCMSN, where I ended up reading some topics over and over again. I think one of the things I will do better is to lab every chapter out more throughly to get it under my nails.

I am trying to get some reading done, even though its extremely hard when im still sick. However, I only got about 5 chapters left in the examination guide. hopefully I can finish them soon, and do some of the last case studies in the lab book. I really want to get this BCMSN out of the way, its starting to get on my nerves. I dont feel prepared enough for the exam though, I dont know why.

I now need to do the remaining labs in the lab portfolio. There are especially some case studies that bridge all the knowledge together (or so it looks like, we’ll see). I do know however, that wireless is a huge area in and by itself. I will think of some scenario to build up using the topics I have learned so far. But right now I really must get some sleep.

I have a sneaking suspecion that I better pay alot of attention towards the wireless section of the BCMSN. It seems like its “out-of-scope” of the BCMSN, but Im quite confident that Cisco will really smack me on it for some reason. The whole gain/loss/radio frequency stuff is not a topic I have paid much attention to in the past, so its quite new for me. I am convinced though, that studying it, will come in handy in real life.

Lately I have been in the need of the right equipment for quite a few labs. What I really need is some equipment that is able to do both Dynamic Arp Inspection (DAI) and IP Source Guard (IPSG). The dynamic arp part is supported on 3550’s as far as I can see, but IPSG is not. It is only available on 4500’s and 6500’s, and I dont think playing on the core 4507R’s at work would be a wise choice 🙂

Been reading the study guide about L2 security. You can really mess up a whole network very simply, and you can basically take down the whole thing pretty easily if your switches are not configured correctly. There was also alot of things about IP spoofing and ARP spoofing. Pretty nifty stuff, and you can all secure your network alot by making some pretty basic choices, and execute them all over your network.

Well, I broke the spanning-tree topology at work today. It was not one of my proudest moments 🙂 I was playing around with the very delicate portfast command, which states in all its glory: “%Warning: portfast should only be enabled on ports connected to a single host. Connecting hubs, concentrators, switches, bridges, etc… to this interface when portfast is enabled, can cause temporary bridging loops. Use with CAUTION” So ofcourse I had it hooked up to another switch, because I was convinced that I read somewhere, that even though this could happen, some still-unknown feature would save the topology….

So im studying redundancy features, especially gateway redundancy features. I think this is some impressing technology. Basically there are three versions, HSRP (cisco proprietary), VRRP (IEEE Standard) and GLBP (cisco proprietary). HSRP was introduced in 1994, and VRRP in 1999, GLBP is alot newer, introduced in 2005. HSRP stands for Hot Standby Router Protocol, VRRP is Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol and finally GLBP is Gateway Load Balancing Protocol. Given the incredible redundancy they each perform, they are incredible simple to setup.

Been reading about CEF yesterday. It doesnt take up much of the exam blueprint, nor CBT nuggets coverage of it. However, it seems that theres more to this than what meets the eye. I also need to figure out what CEF is doing in routers. My assumption is that its being implemented in IOS and where support for hardware is available, it downloads the FIB and adjacency tables from the control plane to the data plane for fast switching.

Today I have spent about 2,5 hours studying different features that enhances the switched network. This includes labbing up BPDU guard, Loop guard, UDLD Aggressive mode, BPDU filtering. Also I find the automatic error recovery feature very interesting. You can set certain causes to put an interface into the errdisabled state. For example if you enable BPDU guard, and a BPDU is “heard” on the interface, it puts the interface into errdisabled.

I have been working my a** off trying to understand STP just fairly well. Its a hard topic, especially with Rapid STP. I have struggled with the synchronisation/proposal/agreement thing. It has helped seeing it on the equipment though. An alternate port can be switched to immediately. If the root port goes down and the switch has a designated port, it performs the proposal/agreement bit, and another switch becomes a designated bridge for it.

Sorry about the lack of posting/progress reports. Also the server has been down for a while. In the meantime, I’ve passed the BSCI exam with an 833 score. Really got my ass kicked on some topics I didnt expect (IS-IS), and ofcourse multicasting which has turned out to be my arch-enemy. I should have done some more labs on ISIS, but I didnt since it didnt take up too much space according to the exam blueprint.

Well, at least some of it. Adjacencies and how IS’s update other IS’s is the thing that nobody can give me an answer to. According to all the material IS’s maintain adjacencies to all others, but still elect a DIS. When doing the labs on this, the only thing I can see the DIS doing is sending out CSNP’s (Complete Sequence Network PDU’s). The DIS is also sending out hello’s every 3.

So yesterday, I started with all the lab exercises that has to do with EIGRP. I did the one in the self-study guide, and one (2.7.1) in the lab portfolio. I also started on 2.7.2. So far, the labs in the labportfolio are far better written than the ones in the self-study guide. Today, I have snuck in a few practice scenarios regarding default route propagation. 3 ways to do it:

Alright, I am done with reading about EIGRP. I am now skimming through the chapter, and taking notes. I have an okay understanding of how EIGRP works, and I am looking forward to the labs to nail out unknowns. I am not 100% convinced about taking notes, or rather doing it in the order im doing (reading first, then skimming and taking notes, then going to the lab). However, when Im done with note-taking i can cross out the “Explain the functions and operations of EIGRP” in the exam blueprint 🙂

Today, I am continuing reading about EIGRP. My goal for today is to get at least 40 pages of EIGRP reading done. Lots of nitty gritty details such as unequal-load balancing and route authentication. To understand and process the material, 10 pages takes up 30 minutes of reading time. This includes reading the material, looking at the topologies being presented and thinking it through (in case of metrics and bandwidth calculate a bit to see where the authors are getting at).

Chapter 3, EIGRP. Started reading about the inner workings of EIGRP today. EIGRP is an improved distance vector protocol provided by Cisco themselves. It is an improved distance vector protocol, because it passes updates directly to its neighbours. It is more advanced than traditional distance vector protocols, because it supports VLSM and it does not use periodic updates. It uses hello packets like link-state protocols. 1st reading done includes: EIGRP packet types.

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.

Okay, so its been a while since my last post. Been having some issues to deal with, which has taken quite alot of energy. I am going for the CCNP, starting with the BSCI exam. Ive got the books for it, and started studying. There’s alot of detailed information, and lots of labs to do. Chapter 2 is 40 pages long, and its taken me two days to reach the end of the information in the book, now im starting the labs in the end of the chapter 🙂

I am happy to report that I managed to pass the CCNA exam yesterday. What a relief. Here it is: Hopefully Maibrith passes her exam today as well!! Update: She did pass it!

I just purchased a Rack from Dantrak UK. I need some sort of solution to mount the gear I have and will be getting. I cant have it all lay around the floor. They (Dantrak UK) is basically a reseller of Dantraknet. I went for the 16U version, in case I will need more space in the future it is upgradeable. Here it is:

I was checking piratgruppen.org (A place in favor of sharing things online) the other day, and found that a new site, rettighedsportalen.dk had been started by a former spokesperson of piratgruppen.org. The site aims to shed some light on immaterial “rights”. This is a good idea and I for one welcome it. One of the first articles that was posted was from the chairman of KODA, a rightsholder organisation for composers in Denmark.

Im writing this on my 3rd HP laptop in 2 years. This is a company owned laptop, because if not, I would never have purchased another laptop from Hewlett Packard. My first HP laptop was a so called NC8430, which is in their line of business laptops. It replaced a T20/T21 (I have forgotten), which was 3+ years old, and still working fine. The NC8430 has a 15″ display, 256mb graphics card, comes with 1 gig of ram (which I had upgraded to 2gig right away), and as far as i remember, a 60 or 80 gb harddrive.

This is cool, a p2p program based on real life trust. Alliance is a program that everyone has seen before, but with a twist. Instead of searching everybody and their uncle’s stash of bits, you only search a much smaller circle of people whom you already trust. This makes it virtually impossible for the RIAA/MPAA/to catch you in the act (if you were doing something illegal with the technology in the first place).

I watched an iPhone get a dent yesterday. Not a pretty sight. It was my girlfriends iPhone. She dropped it on the floor, and unfortunally it landed on the edge of a doorstep, causing it to get a dent. Nothing wrong with the glass surface or function of the phone at all. Ive dropped mine a few times on rocky concrete, without it getting scratches on the glass surface, which has really surprised me.

But it is still the number of peers The Piratebay had sometime during the past week.A peer is defined in the bittorrent world as one who connects to download/upload some part of a file. The number 12.000.000 is also about twice the amount of people living in Denmark at the moment. Just think about what that means for a second. It means that a website to share information has twice as many people using it as a small country has inhabitants.

But it was a close one: “The vote was close, with 314 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) voting in favor of an amendment to scrap what many consider draconian and disproportionate measures to protect copyright over the internet, and 297 voting against the amendment.“ That means there are still 297 souls out there, that really dont get that Internet access is vital for any person living in this day an age.

Filesharing, as I define it, is a way for people to share files with one and another. Filesharing programs, are programs that enable people to do so. The programming instructions which perform the transfer of bits from one computer to another is a technology. Slicing, as I define it, is a way for people to slice something, ie. a loaf of bread. A knife, is a tool that enable people to slice bread.

A fellow by the name of Daniel K has been supplying Windows Vista users with a usable Audio Driver on his own accord. He has been doing this work because Creative has been unable to support this platform which, apparently, quite alot of people are using. A company like Creative really should supply decent quality sound drivers from day one for their customers, especially since they figure their cards to be “professional” grade.

There was no Internet connection at my second hotel, that actually worked. I really do think its a necessity to have a good and reliable Internet connection for your visitors. Watching TV and reading books used to be what you could do in a hotel-room, now however, the Internet is the main source of information for many people, so why not give your hotel an edge and use it as a selling point?

Arthur C. Clarke passed away today at his retreat in Sri Lanka. Besides fighting the nazi’s by helping develop radar facilities, he is also behind many of the conceptual ideas behind space travel and sci-fi in general. He was always very philosophical about mans role in the universe, advocating space splunking whenever possible, and was of the belief that we would reach Mars by 2000. Alas, not everything worked out the way he had hoped, but he was a great thinkerer in the area nevertheless.

“we think a life without internet may be worse than one without money.” — Gizmodo

‘ So simply, and yet so effective.

Yesterday I went into a Humac apple store in Aalborg (Denmark… Its in Europe… Across the water.. anyways), to see the new Apple Macbook Air. Oh dear, thats a sweet little laptop. It really is as thin as you hoped it would be. You really really want one when you are holding it 🙂 Anyways, I think it might be a little too skimpy for my needs. If I was to have another Apple laptop any time soon, it would most likely be a Macbook Pro (15″).

Hi Everyone, I wish you all a Happy New Year! Currently im very busy studying for my 2nd attempt at the CCDE Practical exam. I have it booked for the next slot, which is February 22nd in London. Thankfully there are more and more material available for the CCDE than just a year ago. One of my primary sources are the study group which I have mentioned before, which Daniel (lostintransit.

So I just got back from my first attempt at the CCDE practical, and unfortunally I didnt pass it. It was a very different exam than the CCIE and it takes a little while to become used to the interface and exam style. I started my journey to London on the 30th of August and right off the bat it started out badly with me getting an eye infection in one eye.

“All that matters, is where you are going” is a favorite quote of mine. With that an update as well as a plan to move forward. I have now finished Narbik’s Volume 2 Service Provider workbook. It took a little while longer than I had planned. This is mainly because i took some time off during the holidays (well, studied less at least 🙂 ). Just today, I finished working on a plan of attack for the next phase of my studies.

I apologize for the recent down-time. My provider had a glitch which is hopefully fixed now.

The cat is out of the bag. I am going for my 2nd CCIE. This time its in the Service Provider track. For a while i have felt something missing. And what is missing is a clear cut direction on what i want to learn more about in my professional life. I had a choice to make. Should i simply pick out areas of interest in the networking space and learn what i could about those or should i commit to a certain CCIE track and follow that path of learning.

We are working with alot of customers having lots of small “sites”, meaning that each site range from having 1 to 20 devices. The devices can be a user workstation or it can be some sort of automatic equipment having a VPN tunnel back to the main headquarter. As the importance of each site grows, we are seeing these customers asking for a fail-over method for these sites and with the rise of cheap 3G connections it only seems natural to go down that route.

NAT on a stick. I ran into this a while back, and then again the other day. Its really a puzzling way of doing NAT. The topology: Topology Imagine this scenario (even though its very unlikely as far as i can see): Our organisation has purchased an internet connection with a local provider. They are only able to provide us with 2 available IP addresses + our transit IP address.

Yesterday i managed to do 2 hours worth of lab time + an hour on my latest blog post about BGP. All in all 3 hours worth of CCIE level stuff. I’m pleased with that after my motivational down-time. I also managed to do a lot of physical work yesterday, fixing the car up, getting everything cleaned out. Its gorgeous now. So I was well tired, but after drinking Red Bull i simply could not fall asleep.

Short update before the end of the year. This year has been the worst one for me yet. Mainly because of health reasons. It has also been the year ive accomplished the most in my personal life, obtaining CCNP in the spring, and passing the CCIE written in the autumn. I look forward to 2010 being a year that will prove to be alot better. So far, the girlfriend will graduate next month, she’s already been hired for a new job, and im still enjoying my new job alot.

I just re-cabled my home lab and setup everything so i could work on Narbik’s foundation workbooks. You can check out more at: [http://www.micronicstraining.com ]1 These are the workbooks that you get before the bootcamp, to get you up to speed with individual technologies. All in all theres about 600 pages (~300 pages in Vol1 and the same in Vol2). So far they are very good. Alot of refresheners and some new things that I have not encountered in detail yet.

Its been a while, and for that im sorry. I have been very busy watching VOD (Video On Demand) classes from IPexpert. Scott Morris has done these videos, and he is pretty good at it in my opinion. There are alot of new stuff as well. Things such as Multilink Frame-relay (FRF.16) and PPP over frame-relay. IRB (Integrated Routing and Bridging) was also new for me. Basically you can extend your L2 over a L3 ip routed network.

I have mentioned it before, and i’ll do it again. Flash cards are great for remembering those pesky little details. I wanted to share the flashcards I have created so far: http://flashcarddb.com/cardset/24460-cisco-flashcards Hopefully you can get some use out of them. Ofcourse they are some of the details I have a hard time remembering, but maybe you’ll have some use for them as well. Enjoy! On another note, I got access to another 3550 switch which should arrive sometime next week.

So I saw a post over at Ioshints about bandwidth, how we, as consumers come to expect a certain bandwidth, and how ISP’s are dealing with these issues. It is a fact that ISP’s greatly oversubscribe their networks, and keep selling more access-lines with an even greater bandwidth cap than ever before. So lets explore some of the factors in this bandwidth revolution! The (very) near future: New types of network devices and services is one of the reasons why people need more bandwidth.

Ive spent the last couple of days playing around with the traditional Spanning-tree protocol (802.1D), which has been used for many years, but is pretty slow to converge. As most of you know, Spanning-tree protocol (STP), is used to build a loop-free L2 topology. This is done to avoid bridging loops, where your frames gets sent around and around endlessly. STP does this by assigning ports a certain role and a state.

So I have started my review process. I have some things on my list that I need an in-depth look into. Among these are: IPv6 tunneling types. Web Cache Communication Protocol (WCCP). Some Frame-Relay workings, like FRF.12 and FRF.9. Switching section in BCMSN, particularly MST. Frame-relay traffic shaping. These are the big ones I need to tackle. On top of this I need to review the entire exam certification guide.

I knew it would be tricky before I even started with the multicast section, but not this hard 🙂 So I wrote about PIM-DM and its flooding behavior, and how it would make sure data was flowing from the source to the receivers. I will try to give some information about PIM-SM and also some further information on IGMP. First of, lets define what protocols handles what: IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol).

I skimmed over the ONT blueprint, and it sure seems like alot of voice. I am not quite sure howcome theres that much voice material on there. It bothers me quite frankly, because I dont find the voice part particularly interesting. But alas, I digress, theres just one way to the CCNP, and thats through ONT. I need to come up with a good study plan, to take into account my anxiety.

In just 3 days time I will be leaving for Cisco Live 2019 in Barcelona. Im thinking about what sort of event it will be and what to expect in term of announcements. Especially one thought keeps reappearing and thats the thought of the transformation of Cisco. It is no longer a company with a future in just selling hardware. It itself has been disrupted by the emergence of “everything software” and merchant silicon.

I really like this paragraph, because almost everyone wants to imitate google. Why? well, the answer to that questions seems to be what everyone is missing! Google’s solutions were built for scale that basically doesn’t exist outside of a maybe a handful of companies with a trillion dollar valuation. It’s foolish to assume that their solutions are better. They’re just more scalable. But they are actually very feature-poor. There’s a tradeoff there.

I am currently reading Team of Teams, an excellent book! In it, it highlights an interesting fact that I think is very relevant for the networking world and that is the difference between something that is complicated versus something that is complex. There is a distinct difference in that something complicated can be broken down into its building blocks and analysed with a high degree of certainty. Think of a car engine for example.

New Server: So I just completed a purchase off eBay for a new server for my lab purposes. For a while now I’ve been limited to 32Gb of memory on my old ESXi server, which is really more like 20Gb when my regular servers have had their share. Running a combination of different types of devices, each taking at least 4Gb of memory, doesn’t leave much room for larger labs.

This post is my follow-up on a recent discussion on twitter. Working for a VAR (Value Added Reseller) is not always the glamours life some make it out to be. Working as a consultant, what you are really doing, is being the CEO of your own service company. What you are selling, is basically your own services. The fact that your paycheck is being signed by someone else doesnt/shouldnt really matter.

Why do i keep focusing so much on Cisco, when there are clearly alot of different vendors out there with similar products and technologies? There are several reasons for this. 1) I began the professional part of my networking career with Cisco. 2) Cisco has a proven track record when it comes to education and learning. 3) Even though not always the best match for all use-cases, Cisco is a big player in almost all areas of networking.

People often ask me why i keep studying and when i will be “done”. To me, this type of question seems odd, because i am committed to lifelong learning. I am of the opinion that going through life without learning something all the time would be a life wasted. I think this goes back to the early explorers. Discovering new things, whether it be a new continent or simply a piece of knowledge really excites a certain type of people.

I just had a chance to go ahead and read Mr. Greg Ferro’s ebook called ”Arse First Method of Technical Blogging“. The book is being published by Leanpub (leanpub.com), an independent publisher and the readers will get free updates to the book as they become available. Mr. Ferro is well known from Etherealmind.com as well as the Packet Pushers podcast. The book is all about writing a technical blog. It takes you through some important facets of writing a blog, namely why to blog in the first place and the importance of actually publishing something.

Yesterday brought with it another Java security breach. It is security breach that doesnt yet have a fix for it (0-day), so short of disabling Java on your computer, you are out of luck. Im continually amazed that we keep running this piece of software, but I guess I shouldnt be, given people’s track record of running insecure software (think older Internet Explorer browsers on windows). My dilemma as a Danish citizen is the fact that we are forced to run Java applications from a certain vendor in order to access pretty much anything from our online banking, to our communication with the government.

Just wanted to share another great motivational video  

Its been a rough week. I have been finishing up projects and getting rid of loose ends. I have also been giving a couple of lectures on IPv6 (Basically primers) to customers as well as some information on basic failover configuration in IOS. The advent of 3G and low cost gives alot of new opportunities for customers. The rumor mill indicator is a solid green with news of the comming iPad 3.

The picture below should be put into a frame and put onto the desk of everyone in the IT industry. By day, I am a consultant, so I have quite a few stories that relate to this picture. Obviously the picture shows that, at every step in a project there are misunderstandings. In most instances, this is not intentionally, but simply a result of people not understanding where the other party is coming from and heading to.

Lately i have been watching a Ted video each day. I find this fascinating as i learn stuff in areas i would not normally be looking. I can highly recommend this to anyone in order to stay informed on whats going on in our world. Go there now: Ted.com

My take on the Microsoft purchase of Skype. Only last week i attended a mandatory briefing of Lync, Microsofts all-in-all wonder for communicating. Basically its a PBX, IM-server, Video-conferencing, Outlook-Integrator kind of a product. Basically they have taken alot of code from alot of different half-done products and thrown them into one big pile and put alot of marketing money behind it. Going beyond my own personal beliefs about Microsoft, the one big issue i have with Lync was the fact that they dont have a single product for the smartphone market.

I wanted to take the opportunity to pitch in on the discussion thats presented in this article by Ivan Pepelnjak: http://blog.ioshints.info/2010/07/p2p-traffic-is-bad-for-network.html with the headline of “P2P traffic is bad for the network”. I agree with the headline… Somewhat… P2P is bad for the network, in the sense that it causes congestion and because of that, it makes using the net a bad experience for everyone else. But then again, it seems like theres a real need for P2P traffic (disregarding the entire illegal download discussion).

Well, I broke the spanning-tree topology at work today. It was not one of my proudest moments 🙂 I was playing around with the very delicate portfast command, which states in all its glory: “%Warning: portfast should only be enabled on ports connected to a single host. Connecting hubs, concentrators, switches, bridges, etc… to this interface when portfast is enabled, can cause temporary bridging loops. Use with CAUTION” So ofcourse I had it hooked up to another switch, because I was convinced that I read somewhere, that even though this could happen, some still-unknown feature would save the topology….

So, test is scheduled for tuesday, and im looking through and updating my notes. My plan is to look through all of my notes on the morning, trying to pick up on anything I might have missed during my studying. Also doing some subnetquestions during my awaken hours to keep my mind up to date doing that kind of work. Unfortunally there is a 2 hour drive to the test center, which I could do without, but thats the name of the game.

I read on Slashdot today, that a “Jack Thompson“, walked out of court, apparently because he was being disbarred for 10 years. I couldnt quite remember who he was, but then it dawned upon me, he’s the smock thats been trying to ban what he thinks are violent games, because he’s of the opinion they are bad for society. He didnt think the court had the authority to hand him his ass, so he walked out of there.

I just purchased a Rack from Dantrak UK. I need some sort of solution to mount the gear I have and will be getting. I cant have it all lay around the floor. They (Dantrak UK) is basically a reseller of Dantraknet. I went for the 16U version, in case I will need more space in the future it is upgradeable. Here it is:

I like sunny weather when its moderate, but temperatures in the 25+ Celcius range is a bit too much for me. Especially when I need to spend time in front of my computer. I will need some kind of cooling solution this summer for sure. My idea was a fan with a timer on it for falling asleep, but not having it turned on all night (the draft will make you sick).

Interesting indeed.

Im writing this on my 3rd HP laptop in 2 years. This is a company owned laptop, because if not, I would never have purchased another laptop from Hewlett Packard. My first HP laptop was a so called NC8430, which is in their line of business laptops. It replaced a T20/T21 (I have forgotten), which was 3+ years old, and still working fine. The NC8430 has a 15″ display, 256mb graphics card, comes with 1 gig of ram (which I had upgraded to 2gig right away), and as far as i remember, a 60 or 80 gb harddrive.

Been having alot on my mind lately. Ive been writing down the topics I want to give my opinion on, but just havent gotten around to actually elaborating on them. I will try to rectify that over the comming days. The main reason for this lack of posts, is because of what happened with my health. I really thought I had those panic attacks beaten. However, I must admit to myself, that I need to go another round with this enemy of mine.

Trip to China cut short. For some reason I fell sick in Amsterdam and had to go back to Denmark. Im out sick until friday where I will get to see my doctor. Im quite convinced that what I experienced was a panic attack that just wouldnt go away for some reason. Something needs to be done about this whole thing, its not getting any better and im using way too much energy even thinking about it.

I will be leaving for China tomorrow. Will be going with my favorite coworker, along with my boss, his boss and bookkeeping guy. We will travel from Billund to Amsterdam, and then from Amsterdam to Shanghai. Alot of flying. I will be back friday night. I am quite interested in figuring out exactly what content they are blocking from the net. I would really like to know more about how they do it, since it must be a massive accomplishment, from a technological point of view.

So Ive hit a snag in my learning process. There is a question on one of the chapter tests, that I simply cannot work out. I know the answer, but I simply cant figure out how to that answer. It is really pissing me off. What I want to vent right now, is that its really detrimental to my overoal goal of passing this course, If i cant get past the mental block that “I dont understand something!

In recent months ive re-experienced what its like to have a bad teacher. Im currently taking a CCNA certification, and anyone who has taken one, know there is ALOT of material to go through. To have a good teacher help you with questions and problems would be a huge help. Unfortunally I am not in a position to say I have a good teacher. The place where Im taking the CCNA course have to teachers teaching CCNA, one of them is reportedly enthusiastic, skilled and very motivated about the material, the other, I can now testify, seems to think he’s knowledgeable.

Okay, so Im fed up. I dont like Idols. I dont like Can you dance. I dont like The stage is yours. I dont like complete ripoffs, and basically reruns of the same old, same old. It is simply not something you can call a classic, and keep watching over and over again. It lacks creativeness and any innovative thought processes. So stop it! Alas, They will keep on at it.

This is what the white house looked like during Earth Hour: Earth Hour – An hour where alot of citizens around the world turned of their lights to save electricity, and thereby showing their concern for the environment. I participated, did you?

There was no Internet connection at my second hotel, that actually worked. I really do think its a necessity to have a good and reliable Internet connection for your visitors. Watching TV and reading books used to be what you could do in a hotel-room, now however, the Internet is the main source of information for many people, so why not give your hotel an edge and use it as a selling point?

I am sitting in a hotel room once again, and I am going to be sitting in one until thursday. How do you feel about hotel rooms, and what do you do in one of them? I normally spend most of my awaken time by my laptop, which it is critical for me to have an internet connection. I am quite concerned that the hotel I will be staying at tomorrow, does not have an internet connection, in which case I will be spending the evening watching movies I suspect.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away today at his retreat in Sri Lanka. Besides fighting the nazi’s by helping develop radar facilities, he is also behind many of the conceptual ideas behind space travel and sci-fi in general. He was always very philosophical about mans role in the universe, advocating space splunking whenever possible, and was of the belief that we would reach Mars by 2000. Alas, not everything worked out the way he had hoped, but he was a great thinkerer in the area nevertheless.

I just learned that a local handball team (HF-Mors), apart from being sponsored by various sponsors the normal way, by having their expenses and training gear taken care of, also got their mortgage/rent paid. I think this is crossing the line for a small time handball team. I think the sponsorships should cover broadly for more exotic things as well, not just the mainstream stuff like handball/football. If the sponsorship is primarily to gain revenue, then it should be seen that way, but these sponsorships are being pushed to the public as being good for the local community.

A 16 year old kid was recently beaten to death for no apparent reason. Senseless violence an indication of a worse society? I think so. I have no more to say about this than whats already been said. We should all be ashamed.

A plane from Copenhagen to Amsterdam, was cancelled yesterday, because of fear of terror. A group of middle eastern men (all of whom are airline pilots in an Iraqi airline), was the cause of the fear to a Dutch man. One of the middle eastern men, had to use the restrooms, and, like me, you and everybody else, left his luggage (carry-on-bag) with his friends. This apparently was a cause for alarm, the police was called, the plane cancelled, and all for nothing.

America’s war on tourism: airlines to foot the bill for fingerprinting foreigners as the leave the US Scotland Yard wants DNA samples from 5-year-olds in case they grow up to be criminals; Oyster card records to become part of “war on terror” I mean, come on. Do you really think this sort of thing is sensible to do? If you read the first article, you will know that the US laws, regarding scanning/fingerprinting/probing of foreigners coming to the country, have only found 1000 Visa-Over-stayers at a price of $15.

Please dont try this at home, but if you do, id like to see the outcome:

“we think a life without internet may be worse than one without money.” — Gizmodo

Been doing alot this week. Mainly been studying some more. Couple of important chapters, I need to get down really well. How do you get hard information into your brain, and get it to stay there, and understand it for good? Im not sure, but Im starting to think that writing down things manually really helps me personally. On another note, I am getting really screwed over by the IRS. They are really starting to piss me off.

Watched a short video clip on Digg today, about a guy who knew he only had a few months to live, and yet he choose to make the most of it. This should really be a lesson to alot of us, to enjoy life!! Link

Yesterday I went into a Humac apple store in Aalborg (Denmark… Its in Europe… Across the water.. anyways), to see the new Apple Macbook Air. Oh dear, thats a sweet little laptop. It really is as thin as you hoped it would be. You really really want one when you are holding it 🙂 Anyways, I think it might be a little too skimpy for my needs. If I was to have another Apple laptop any time soon, it would most likely be a Macbook Pro (15″).

How will peace ever be established between the large parts of the muslim world and the west, when young kids are being taught to kill for depicting a god in a way you dont like? Well, thats exactly what a children show stipulated a few days ago, regarding the now infamous Muhammed drawings. A show for kids by the palestinian channel al Aqsa, had a pink bunny say, that if the artist behind the drawings ever did such a thing again, he must certainly die!

This is a pretty cool billboard hack. I like it alot. “Evil Death Star” anyone?

These Quantum Fireball harddrives was the bomb back in the day, this is what it looks like when one crash: Unfortunally I dont have any more of these laying around, and if I did, I would probably replace them after seeing this 🙂

It would seem that another HP NC8430 is about to bite the dust. It has been running its fan constantly for the last couple of months, and using coretemp.exe i can see that both cores are extremely hot all the time (75+ degrees Celcius). Again, HP disappoints, I need to pay to have onsite service, and not just a small fee, but about 250 Euros. If they really wanted a true “Personal” appearance, they should either make better products, or charge a minimum fee to fix them.

“and do you really believe 10,000 outraged letters to a congressman outweigh $10,000 in unmarked bills? government is one of the few real bargains left” Seen on BoingBoing.net regarding the ComCast hearing (FCC)

Okay, so this sunday evening, my folks and the like of my girlfriend aren meeting for the first time, and a heavy debate is under way, concerning what to serve them. What do you serve on such an occasion, and how do people with limited dining room make something nifty anyways?

Anyone ever thought about how the destruction of property is getting worse and worse? This weekend, alot of lamp posts got thrashed close to where I live. A few weeks back somebody actually stole a car and ran into the exact same lamp posts, busting them completely. And the recent burnings around Denmark because of the prophet thing. It just keeps getting worse and worse, and more and more accepted. Its pissing me off.

Fun quote from jokes4all.net: _– What do you call an intelligent man in America? – A tourist._ There are alot of smart people in America. There is also alot of really stupid people. Guess which group is in power at the moment?