Technology

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. 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.

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.

[polldaddy poll=3121673]

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.

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.

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. These days we might even have non-BGP speakers in our core, such as with MPLS.

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.

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). When will this be used? For aggregation purposes.

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?

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 🙂

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.

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). Now back to a single rent!! Put on top of that the fact that im still not over the flu by a longshot. Im coughing, my throat hurts and im constantly nauseaus.

First off, thanks to the two sites below, i finally learned what this beast was about. Thanks guys!

[Human Modem][1]

[CCIE Candidate][2]

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

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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). This is a good balance if you ask me. Its not that theory is bad, its just that its so detailed, that you can only grasp so much of it.

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.

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.

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

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”.

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.

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. In a “normal” external routes will be present as a type 5 LSA. This type 5, will either be an E1 or an E2 route. The difference being that the metric associated with the LSA will increase with an E1 and it will not with an E2 route. The default is an E2 route and the default metric is 20.

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.

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.

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 🙂

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.

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 🙂

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. Ofcourse its sad to loose some coworkers, some of which i have been working with for close to 9 years. But life goes on.

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. All very interesting stuff.