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.

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.

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.

 

 

 

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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