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The exam has been documented elsewhere, so i wont spend much time on it here. Suffice it to say its a difficult beast 🙂

“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 🙂 ).

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.

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.

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:

Imagine this scenario (even though its very unlikely as far as i can see):

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. It ended up being about 2:30 – 3:00 before i finally dosed off. Up at 6:30 again, and now I’m smashed 🙂

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. If I have time, I will also try to define all the terms, which is one of the tasks they (exam cert. guide) suggests that you do.

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.

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.