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First shot = Failure.

So i had my first lab attempt on tuesday the 2nd of November.

Boy was it hard 🙂

Unfortunally i didnt pass this time around.

I did very well in the troubleshooting part, but the configuration part, got the best of me.

At the bootcamp last week, i was almost out of reach from my lab.

Even though i just got the remote power controller, the network at both the conference place as well as the hotel (especially the hotel!) was pretty bad.

This was all written yesterday 🙂

Airport fun!

So right now (im sitting in London Stansted Airport after having attended the last of Narbiks bootcamp. Its going to be good to get home to the girlfriend and my puppy.

He had a guest with him this time around. Rolf Schärer. The guy is a tripple CCIE (R&S, SP and Storage). Very knowledgeable and nice guy. If you have business in and around the Swiss nation, he is a safe bet when it comes to Cisco technologies.

As you may have noticed from my inexcusable lack of posts, ive been very busy.

I have been finishing up IPexperts volume 1 workbooks and now going through volume 2. Still lots of interesting details to learn about. I have also managed to get most of my video-on-demand material onto my iPad so i have easier access to it.

I wanted to point your attention to gns3vault.com. Alot of students use GNS3 (front end for dynamips) to do alot of their lab work.

Rene Molenaar created this site, which is basically a site with free labs that you can download and practice on. A great idea!

Im back from vacation. I can now with convinction state that hotels in Spain are not up to par with other places. I have been to Spain twice now, and they NEVER have an internet connection in the rooms. You had Wifi in the lobby, 2€ for an hour, and it barely worked.

Awesome. Got alot of EEM ground covered today.

Seems like a very powerful scripting engine that stands out, by having the ability to be triggered under certain

circumstances.

Lets check out an example using the topology below:

As you can see, we have our interfaces defined, they are in an up state, we have EIGRP working, we have an access-list applied,

I have started doing IPexpert Vol 1. technology labs. They are pretty challeging. They make you think out of the box. Almost none of it is vanilla configuration.

I dont know how closely these labs reflect the real one. Ofcourse these are Vol. 1 labs, but what i mean by it, is especially the wording. Maybe its just me.

Woke up early this morning to get a head-start on the Video-on-Demand courses. I do it by looking at the PDF’s thats covered on each configuration section, and try and replicate the topology as well as solving all the tasks.

Update 11-08-2010: I can now create RMON alarms and events. It seems the command set for RMON is pretty limited. Not much around the net as to how deep to go into this. Hope its enough.

I just looked over the detailed blueprint which is authored by cisco. It had checkmarks, which i used to mark down things i knew i could configure, as well as things i really need more training in. These are the topics i have either forgotten about or just havent paid attention to. Anyways, these are the things i will need to study more in the comming month:

Okay these are some really cool maps if you are into networking (and i know you are):

http://www.cablemap.info/

http://www.telegeography.com/product-info/map_cable/index.php

They show submarine communications cables. What a job to lay down those suckers.

I followed the PPC-1 installation a while back. Its the new submarine cable going into Australia. It had its own blog, with info and pictures. Very interesting.

I wanted to take the opportunity to pitch in on the discussion thats presented in this article by Ivan Pepelnjak:

http://blog.ioshints.info/2010/07/p2p-traffic-is-bad-for-network.html with the headline of “P2P traffic is bad for the network”.

I agree with the headline… Somewhat… P2P is bad for the network, in the sense that it causes congestion and because of that, it makes using the net a bad experience for everyone else.

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):

I have vented about this topic before and will do so once again. I am doing this because i believe its very important.

Students who are studying for Cisco exams or engineers who are trying to lab up a technology before deploying it, have found Dynamips and used Cisco hardware very useful in the past. However, with the new exam requirements and the new licensing methods for IOS, these tools will not be available to you in the future.

Troubleshooting. An artform in itself.

I have been doing trouble-shooting labs for the last week and its not going the way i want it to.

In all fairness, its very good practice! having all the components in one lab, with all sorts of technologies interconnected really makes life interesting.

Im trying out a new design layout. Its not quite finished yet, need some tweaks here and there, but im hoping it will be a bit easier to read my posts in the future.

Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Anyone who has been following Cisco products recently (last year or so), must have noticed Cisco’s new products.

This includes the Flip video recorder as well as the new tablet that has just been announced.

On top of that, adding the Linksys brand to their portfolio a couple of years ago, proves they are going in a completely different direction than previously.

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.

It has been an insane extended weekend.

We have been doing 90% physical  stuff all weekend long. Most of Friday and Saturday passed, with us painting the living room ceiling. We wanted to freshen it up as we are working on creating a whole new living room. It will be an expensive  journey for sure. Sunday we started picking up the new furniture.

[polldaddy poll=3121673]

So im almost ready to release my first version of my flashcards. I had hoped to reach 200 questions by today, but i havent been able to manage that yet. Lots of real life stuff has been happening today (completely cleaning two cars as well as putting summer-tires on them).

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.

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 🙂

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.