CCIE Candidate

Okay.  One last thing, and I’m done blogging about scenario 7.  Really, I promise.  The last major task I was working through was a Cat3560 QoS nested policy map that would mark traffic, map it to a specific queue, and police various traffic to various rates.  Not too hard (a little hard) in concept, mostly [...]

I wasn’t going to blog about this scenario anymore, but this one issue is so freaky, I just have to. The scenario asked for RIPng to load-balance IPv6 traffic over the ethernet and serial links in a 2:1 ratio. So, for every packet routed over the serial, 2 would go over the ethernet [...]

Other miscellany picked up from scenario 7…
The snmp-server system-shutdown command will allow the router to be reloaded via a remote SNMP set command, assuming the proper SNMP credentials, of course.
The buffers command allows you to modify system buffer pools, useful for process-switched packets.
Just because the lab stated that you can’t use a NUMBERED access list, [...]

The Catalyst 3560 has the ability to error-disable interfaces you define, if another interface has gone down. This is known as link state tracking. The feature is straightforward. You define an interface to track as an “upstream” interface. If that upstream interface goes down, you can then err-disable ports you’ve defined as [...]

I didn’t spend any time with the rack last night. I couldn’t face it. I just relaxed, got a good night’s sleep, and I’m spending the afternoon here finishing up scenario 7. This is sort of like what I think the afternoon may be like in the real lab - I’ve got [...]

I just locked up my stupid terminal server again. Man, I hate that thing. How can a company possibly ship a product where the SSH daemon just dies for no apparent reason, the only remaining option being to reboot it? Grr.
Anyway, I got the BGP done (with help from the answer key), [...]

I think I’ve found a huge time-saving key for me. If I generate configs in Notepad, and then apply them, it’s saving me a ton of time. This may sound obvious, but I wasn’t doing the configs that way before. Previously, I was going into each router, and doing a bit at [...]

I started scenario 7 tonight, which is classified by NetMasterClass.com as “difficult”. Scenarios 1-6 were merely “moderate”. There are number of oddball things that I don’t know how to do. (Have I said that before? Like pretty much every scenario I’ve done thus far?) But, I’m determining to work through [...]

This was a miserable week at work. Lots of production issues, lots of meetings to review status of production issues, etc. Every once in a while, I’d get time to actually WORK on the issues, so that we can put them behind us. But it was long days, long phone [...]

So this was an interesting day. I went to an F5 Networks seminar down in the Boston area on using F5 gear to front-end Microsoft Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 so that performance is good over the WAN. The event was kind of sale-sy (you know how those things can be), but it [...]

I got rolling along with NMC scenario 6 tonight, managing to plow through the frame-relay, PPP, Catalyst VLAN, OSPF and RIP. Most of the requested tasks were what I’m starting to think of as “normal” requests. IOW, things I’d NEVER do in real-life, but what you’re supposed to know how to do to [...]

There’s a ton more to be done on this scenario, and I’m just not up to it.  Almost every remaining task has some complication or other than I’d have to look up and read about.  Or it’s a task I’m completely unfamiliar with.  So, what I opted to do in this case was to read [...]

I have a lot more of this scenario to go, and my Saturday is wearing on. But I have a few comments that I have to make. First, I had a somewhat complicated BGP setup to do with a route-reflector inside of a confederation, and a lot of iBGP peers that were not [...]

Tonight I completed mutual route redistribution for the IGPs. That doesn’t sound like much, but tonight, I did it all by myself and it works correctly. It’s like staying dry on your first day of wearing briefs! (Can you tell I had small children in the house not that long ago?)
So, what [...]

One of the things I’m trying to develop with these practice labs is a step-by-step process that will get me through the real lab with a minimum of mistakes. At the moment, my mental process flows like this (probably similar to other published strategies that the big training companies have, no great revelations here, [...]