Wednesday the 22nd of February, in a testing center in the middle of London, my journey towards achieving the CCDE certification, finally ended in me passing this beast of an exam. This learning journey was a very different one than either of my CCIE’s.

In this post I would like to give a demonstration of using the Auto-Tunnel Mesh group feature. As you may know, manual MPLS-TE tunnels are first and foremost unidirectional, meaning that if you do them between two PE nodes, you have to do a tunnel in each direction with the local PE node being the headend.

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.

For a while now, the concept of EVC’s (Ethernet Virtual Circuits) and EFP’s (Ethernet Flow Points), has eluded me. In this short post, i will provide you with a simple example of a couple of EFP’s. In a later post i will discuss the MEF concept of EVC’s.

In case you are serious about going for the CCDE certification, I highly recommend you check out my friend Martin Duggan’s new lab(s) on Leanpub. His writing style is very good and its easy to follow along and i look forward to hitting this lab myself.

In this post, I will put together a variety of different technologies involved in a real-life DMVPN deployment. This includes things such as the correct tunnel configuration, routing-configuration using BGP as the protocol of choice, as well as NAT toward an upstream provider and front-door VRF’s in order to implement a default-route on both the Hub and the Spokes and last, but not least a newer feature, namely Per-Tunnel QoS using NHRP.

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.

I am fortunate enough, to be able to goto Cisco Live US! again this year. Last year was such an experience, that my hopes are really high for this year as well. I will be arriving on Friday the 8th and leaving on the 15th.

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune of attending Jeremy Filliben’s CCDE Bootcamp. It was a great experience, which I will elaborate on in another post. But one of the technology areas I had a bit of difficult with, was GETVPN.

Wow, what a busy month this has been! So I started my new job on February 1st and thus far, everything has been really great. My new coworkers are very friendly and helpful. I’ve spent the better part of february, trying to get to grips with the SP network I will be focusing on from now on.

This post is my follow-up on a recent discussion on twitter. Working for a VAR (Value Added Reseller) is not always the glamours life some make it out to be. Working as a consultant, what you are really doing, is being the CEO of your own service company.

I was fortunate enough to finally pass the CCDE written exam yesterday morning. That begs the question of “Now What?” Well, I will spend a couple of days putting together a study strategy, based on where I am now compared to where I need to be in order to pass the exam.

Its time for a change! It was a tough decision, but i’ve decided that I need some new challenges in my professional life. To that effect, i’ve quit my old job and joined a different VAR/SP where I will be working in a skilled team of network engineers.

I’ve got some important news which I will reveal in the beginning of December!

So stay tuned 🙂

 

Why do i keep focusing so much on Cisco, when there are clearly alot of different vendors out there with similar products and technologies? There are several reasons for this. 1) I began the professional part of my networking career with Cisco.

People often ask me why i keep studying and when i will be “done”. To me, this type of question seems odd, because i am committed to lifelong learning. I am of the opinion that going through life without learning something all the time would be a life wasted.

Even though im still in San Diego, Cisco Live! US 2015 is but a memory. But what a memory it is! It being my first time attending a Cisco Live conference, I didn’t really know what to expect. What I was met with, was a conference full of really sharp and nice people.

This blog post outlines what “MPLS VPNs over mGRE” is all about as well as provide an example of such a configuration. So what is “MPLS VPNs over mGRE”? – Well, basically its taking regular MPLS VPN’s and using it over an IP only core network.

I am preparing for the CCDE written exam, which I have coming up at CLUS. There are so much material to go through, both to read as well as watch CL presentations, it can be a bit overwhelming at times.

This is my current schedule for the Cisco Live US 2015 event. Most are related to my CCDE studies and a few are with technologies and products that im interested in in general. Monday: 08:00 – 09:30 BRKSAN-2101 FCoE for small and mid size enterprises.

I will be attending this year’s Cisco Live US in San Diego! This is my first Cisco Live, so I dont really know what to expect. There are alot of great sessions that I want to attend (if they are not already full), and I will be posting my week here when i have my sessions down.

Just wanted to let you know that Daniel from lostintransit.se is doing a webinar on network design. I will be attending and helping out any way i can.

Go here to learn more: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/community_cafe/2015/01/21/network-design-fundamentals-webinar-with-ciscovip-daniel-dib

In this post I would like to highlight a relative new (to me) application of MPLS called Unified MPLS. The goal of Unified MPLS is to separate your network into individual segments of IGP’s in order to keep your core network as simple as possible while still maintaining an end-to-end LSP for regular MPLS applications such as L3 VPN’s.

My apology. I have been very absent here as of late. I have been doing some different stuff, which is irrelevant here, but rest assured, i got some posts lined up. The next one on Unified MPLS. I think you will like it, so stay tuned!

Woke up to a very nice email today.

I have been selected as a Cisco Champion for 2015! – Now i get to see what all the fuzz is about and hopefully be able to contribute something.

In this post id like to provide an example of a fairly new development to EIGRP which is called EIGRP Over The Top (OTP). In all its simplicity it establish an EIGRP multihop adjacency using LISP as the encapsulation method for transport through the WAN network.

I am currently performing a bit of maintenance on the blog (moving host), so there might be some small errors here and there. I apologise for this! – Hopefully everything will be up and running smoothly in a few days time.

In this post i will show how and why to use a feature called IPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD). IPv6 prefix delegation is a feature that provides the capability to delegate or hand out IPv6 prefixes to other routers without the need to hardcode these prefixes into the routers.

In this post I will be showing you how its possible to use different paths between your PE routers on a per VRF basis. This is very useful if you have customers you want to “steer” away from your normal traffic flow between PE routers.

In this fairly short post, id like to address a topic that came up on IRC (#cciestudy @ freenode.net). Its about how you select a route thats being redistributed into an OSPF NSSA area and comes into the OSPF backbone area 0.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network. LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity.

In the process of restudying EIGRP as a protocol, and more specifically as to how it converges, you can’t avoid running into the saying “Remember to bound your queries!”. From a conceptual point of view its fairly easy to understand that the further out you ask for a prefix the longer the convergence process will take.

I have decided to change my focus quite a bit. I was planning on tackling the IOS-XR exam this year and was preparing for it by going through the blueprint. However another track kept pulling me towards it, and ofcourse thats the CCDE track.

At the moment I’m going through whitepapers, Cisco Live 365 presentations and IOS XR fundamentals learning about switching fabrics. Its a steep learning curve, but in its own way its quite fascinating. There are a lot of acronyms to be mastered, so later on i will post a list that might serve myself and others when looking at these sort of architectures.

I have a lot of non-technical related projects in the pipeline, but study wise, whats next up for me is the IOS XR specialist exam. I think the blueprint for it looks interesting and it provides a way for me to learn more about IOS XR.

Well, a short update. I managed to pass the CCIE Service Provider lab exam on March 14th.

I am quite exhausted from the experience, but very happy 🙂

With the release of the IOS XRv router, along with CSR (Cloud Services Router), its time that I go ahead and build myself a virtualization solution. To that effect, I have just ordered the components for a home build server, which was the cheapest, not to mention most silent option available.

Its been a long time since my last update. I apologise for this. It wasnt my intention, it just sort of happened. In the meantime I have tried the CCIE SP lab and didnt pass it, so I am still studying for my next attempt which is comming up shortly.

The CSNP on multiaccess networks The CSNP (Complete Sequence Number PDU) on multi-access networks is being sent out on behalf of the DIS (Designated Intermediate System), which acts as the pseudonode representing the multi-access network. Its being used as ISIS’s way of making sure everybody on the multi-access network is up to date.

In this short post i want to try and shed some light on a couple of ISIS timers that had me confused at first. I think i got them down now, but please let me know if i have misunderstood them.