CCIE

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. This is not the ideal solution.

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.

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.

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.

<div id="attachment_928" style="width: 548px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">
  <a href="http://www.packet-forwarding.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/topology.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-928" title="EIGRP Topology" src="http://www.packet-forwarding.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/topology.jpg" alt="" width="538" height="82" /></a>
  
  <p class="wp-caption-text">
    EIGRP Topology
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<br /> <strong>Configuration:</strong>

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.

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.

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). Either way, you as a user can get directly to more and more IPv6 content by the day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

As promised, here is a couple of photos of the final layout.

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  Total Layout
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<p class="wp-caption-text">
  More detailed view
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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:

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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!