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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.