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.

Just wanted to let everyone know that im working on a post describing the Narbik bootcamp. Just concentrated on labs at the moment. It will arrive shortly 🙂

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”.

I normally dont post/view/send alot of video clips around. But today this entered my twitter, and i thought id share it. I really find it an awesome clip:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEkz1XK75XE&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Hope you like it, take care!

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).

I finally got around to ordering my bootcamp.

I have chosen Narbik Kocharians bootcamp over both IPexpert and Internetwork Expert. I have only heard great things about his classes, so it was a pretty obvious choice for me.

I will be going feb. 1st until feb. 5th.

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.

Just wanted to create a quick post.. And the post is: Red Bull still rocks 🙂

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.

So a simple concept right?

Tunnel your L2 protocols through a switched network? I agree, but as usual, i put more complication into it. Basically a VOD from IPexpert on L2protoco-tunnel used to create a trunk connection. In the video it is shown that you can create a trunk by using a l2protocol-tunnel (STP in particular). Through extensive testing and discussion on OSL, this is possible, but you will only get the native-vlan traffic through.

I am getting used to hearing Scott Morris’s voice by now 🙂

I am doing Video On Demand classes at the moment. Im starting from the beginning and going through them one by one. Lots of new things to learn and study. Today for example i learned about “real” bridging. Since its not on any blueprint for CCNA, CCNP or even CCIE R&S, its not something ive come across before. It is a pretty cool feature. In the VOD, it was configured over frame-relay over a certain DLCI. You could then have the same subnet on both sides and do ARP request (Well, any ethernet (ieee) stuff) and get a response, and then transfer data.

The lack of posts recently has its cause.

I have been playing around with a screencast. The problem boils down to compressing the video somehow. I made a recording, and unfortunally it was recorded in a too good of a quality, resulting in a pretty big filesize (~300Mb). I then tried several (read: ALOT) of different tools to somehow compress it. I have still to figure it out. But anyways, I uploaded it to youtube because i didnt know where else to put it. If anyone has any ideas for doing a better job, please let me know.

Here is the brainstorm about the preparation on the CCIE lab I have come up with so far. Remember that this is no final list or any “magic pill” of any sorts, it is just some thoughts I have been having.

Intro:

Authentication is a critical part of administrating your network devices. For the longest time, i know for a fact that alot of companies use a simple authentication mechanism. Namely a either a line password, or at best local user database authentication. The inherent problem of these is that they are static entries, and on top of that, you have to manually do it on all the devices in your network. If a change need to occur, it requires logging in to all of the devices and changing the password (and or username).

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.

One of my last tasks at work before I stop, is to create a new switched network for a location in Estonia. It will be a 10 switch network. The company is reusing two 3560 switches which I still need to receive.

Lately I havent been keeping up my chores on the blog. Theres a good reason for this.

I have really been studying hard to do the written exam again. Done lots of practice tests, a lot of technology focused labs on especially some edge areas where I wasnt 100% sure of things. And especially a lot of Cisco documentation. Every time I reached a snag I looked up the documentation from Cisco and read through what it was supposed to do and how.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I have been very busy with real-life things as well as reading a bunch of stuff.

Does anyone know if it is legal to advertise on wordpress.com? I cant find any guidelines regarding this in the terms-of-service. Also, if it IS legal, how do you do it? I have been searching around and cant find any widgets that allow me to insert an advertisement?

Right now Im working on security topics! This is by FAR my weakest area according to all the tests.

I am approaching this from the ground up. Reading exam certification guide. Taking notes. Try it out on the lab. All the things i get wrong, i read whitepapers/documentation on. This will hopefully get down alot of concepts that i tend to screw up.

If you are into the world of CCIE stuff, you know that both the written and the lab exams will change very shortly.

Alot of emphasis will be put onto the task of troubleshooting networks. From the onset this seems like a tricky part to teach anyone, and it is. One company, even how many smart people they hire, can only think up amount of troubleshooting networks and write documentation for them and so on. So what to do?

Been a few days since my last post.

During that time, I have taken quite a few practice tests to gauge where im at. I am also slowly progressing through the Exam Guide.

Also, in the near future im switching over to a new hosting service. Need some features which wordpress doesnt allow me to use, such as advertising. I got a friend in germany who has a colocated server which he will provide some access to. Very grateful for this.

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.

Even though my next post was going to be about some enhancements to STP, I found this little nugget about OSPF behavior, that I thought I would share with everyone.

As we know OSPF, when crossing an area boundary, the ABR (Area Border Router), will gather type 1 (router and its links) and type 2 (network information provided by the DR on a transit network) and form a type 3 LSA, which is basically a boiled down version of the two other types of LSA’s. It will send this LSA into the area (assuming its not a totally stubby/nssa area).

This is the 2nd post about 802.1D, also known as spanning-tree. In the previous post, I explained alot of functionality behind the selection of ports on both root bridges as well as non-root bridges. (Remember a switch is a bridge).

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.