Hi Everyone, I wish you all a Happy New Year! Currently im very busy studying for my 2nd attempt at the CCDE Practical exam. I have it booked for the next slot, which is February 22nd in London. Thankfully there are more and more material available for the CCDE than just a year ago.

So I just got back from my first attempt at the CCDE practical, and unfortunally I didnt pass it. It was a very different exam than the CCIE and it takes a little while to become used to the interface and exam style.

“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.

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.