CCIE Command Memorizer MPLS

This is just a quick post to say that David Bombal (http://www.configureterminal.com/) has been working hard on the CCIE Command Memorizer and a new MPLS version is in the process of being released. I have not had much time at the moment but hopefully I will get some hands on with it fairly soon and post an up date on it. There was a new version released at the end of March as well but I never had the time to do a review of it. Although it might seem a simple tool it helps me keeps me afloat with my studies at the moment as work is taking over my life. I think it's simplicity is the key you can run it on a lower powered laptop and so something like a netbook becomes a very handy tool to practice on when you are out and about. Also the simplicity means I can maximise my study time instead of wasting valuable time setting up a lab in Dynamips or with my routers I can jump straight on and get at least a little practice when I have 5 minutes. Also I would recommend this tool to people who are not pursuing their CCIE's in my opinion it would make a great CCNP and now with MPLS a great CCIP practice tool as well. In fact I credit it with being the main reason for my recent success in the CCIP BGP Exam. I did not have time to practice on Dynamips or any real routers but I did run through all the BGP labs and they solidified the commands in my head.



As for the CCIE study well it is going no where still. I am looking into whether it will be possible to hire someone to help look after my kids on a Saturday so I can get a couple of hours to study. Not sure if many people want to work Saturdays for the money I can afford but we will see. Also there is a chance that work will eat up all my weekends for the next 12 months so study time might still be out of the question.



Anyhow as I said I hopefully will get some time to play with the new Command Memorizer and post a quick review in the not to distant future. Good luck to the rest of you out there most of the other bloggers seem to be making good progress towards their CCIE or even their second and third CCIE's. I just want the time to do one please :-)

To Bootcamp or Not to Boot Camp

Okay so the opportunity for me to go on a CCIE boot camp has come up. I was having a look on the Micronics website following some posts I saw on the CCIE Candidate blog and I saw that there was a boot camp running from the 18th of May in London. (The location is not really London, it is outside London but that is better for me because the Big Smoke is ridiculously expensive for those of us who do not get paid Big Smoke salaries.)

Anyhow I would not normally consider myself ready for a boot camp as you have probably seen my preparation so far has been a bit lacking to say the least. However I saw some interesting comments once again on the CCIE Candidate website where some people had gone on the boot camp without having done any full scale labs because of Narbik's free re-take policy (however there might not be any more classes in the UK that I can attend so it might become very expensive should I want to re-take). So that made me wonder whether I should contemplate the boot camp to kick start my studying again.

Obviously only I can make the final decision on whether to go for it but I thought I would get the opinions of the one of two people who still read this blog to help me solidify my decision. So I thought I would be honest about my situation and see what the rest of the CCIE community think.

My main issue at the moment is time, as I have previously mentioned in other posts I have two very young children and it would be unfair to leave their mother to care for them both all day every day. (Much as I would love it if she did agree to do this and returned them to me when they could go to the toilet themselves :-) ) This lack of time during the day would not be so bad because my wife has agreed that I can do some work in the evenings when one of them has gone to bed, but the problem is I also have a very demanding job at the moment. I work a lot of overtime in the evenings because I need to and I need the money at the moment. It looks like work will get even more hectic in the future months as I am in the middle of a very large project.

I was going to let things meander a long and try get some studying in when I could, with the hope I could now be ready for a November lab date. However the rumors about the lab changes that have appeared in recent days have got me scared. I could do without learning new stuff and since I do not work in an ISP environment (which I believe is the best possible place to learn about networking) I am not keen on having to do MPLS. So if I want to get anywhere near a lab attempt before any changes come into force I need to get cracking. I was thinking that maybe the boot camp would be an ideal way to propel me forward in my studies.

Money is a bit tight at the moment but I have some money from an inheritance that I could use to pay for the course as it would all have to be self funded. So it would be a quite an investment when I would still have to pay for the lab exam and the flights to get to the lab exam.

On the money front I have previously invested in quite a lot of training materials. I have the IPExpert Blended Learning Solution, as well as the Internetwork Expert CoD and Boot Camp CoD. In workbook terms I have electronic copies of the IPExpert stuff and the Internetwork Expert workbooks as well as hard copies of Narbik's Advanced Technologies workbook. So maybe I have enough material and should really focus on making best use of what I already have. I must admit I do find my concentration wanders quite a lot in the CoD's and getting through them seems to take a bit longer then you would think. So maybe a boot camp would be a better option for me.

So what I would like to hear is the opinions of people as to what they think. There are plenty of people who have passed with out going on a boot camp and I certainly seem to have enough material. However there are plenty of people who rave about the boot camps and especially Narbik's one. The other question is how do the CoD's compare to the real thing? So let me know what you think to help me make up my mind.

There has to be an easier way

Well I am still alive although as the title of this post suggests things are not going all that smoothly at the moment. So when I say there has to be an easier way I do not mean of bringing up two young children (I thought one was bad, one is a picnic compared to two :-) ) or studying for a CCIE (although I wish there was). What I really mean is there has to be an easier way of managing a PIX/ASA/FWSM whatever you want to call them.

I am not really much of a firewall person but my job at the moment involves a lot of firewall stuff and mainly on the FWSM modules. I have had a bit of Checkpoint experience before and I know Etherealmind had a post about ditching Checkpoint since their support was so rubbish. However although their support may be rubbish (I am lucky I have never had to experience it) their product in my opinion is superior to what you get from Cisco. How on earth have Cisco not got anything that compares to SmartView Tracker when trying to figure out what is happening on your firewall. Unless I am missing something you can try and look through Syslogs or the logging output on screen. I cannot find a way to filter as easily as in Checkpoint and I even have trouble finding stuff at the moment. I use Kiwi Syslog Viewer so if anyone has any better suggestions they would be most welcome. Also when you have multiple interfaces and multiple firewall contexts the rule base can get very confusing for me at least so if anyone has any suggestions for good tools to use to edit PIX/ASA/FWSM ACL's I would appreciate it.

Apart from struggling with Cisco firewalls not much has been happening in my life. As you can probably see from the neglected state of this blog CCIE study has been none exist in the last couple of months due to work and family commitments. I have no spare time in my life at the moment as if I am not working a horrendous amount of overtime I am looking after the kids to compensate for me not being arround due to the overtime. Cacth 22 although I am grateful I do have the work at the moment when so many people do not.

Hopefully once all my projects are out of the way and both kids at least sleep through the night then I will be able to get back on track with my CCIE. In the meantime hopefully I will get a chance to maybe post about the FWSM (if I ever figure it out) and the new version of the CCIE Comamnd Memorizer that I have not had much time to play with yet, or if that fails I may get a chance to produce some more whinging posts :-)

Network Analysis

At the moment I am researching which is the best tool to buy for an enterprise network in terms of discovering network performance and so I thought I would ask any readers of this blog for their recommendations.

First a bit of background I work in a support team in a large enterprise and we often get calls reporting the "network is slow". Now we have some tools that help us monitor the utilization of the links but they cannot show us the top talkers across the links. Our current tool set also does not allow us to see what protocols are being used across the link and we have no chance of being able to prove what application is causing the problem. It always turns out to be an application or patch deployment that causes the problem, however we usually have to let the users suffer from a "slow network" until the problem goes away. To me this is unacceptable service and I have started investigating products that can give us a bit more visibility into the network.

Ideally what I would like is an application that can pull NetFlow stats from the routers and via some sort of probe be able to investigate switched traffic. I would require the product to determine application responsiveness and ideally be able to build a baseline over time. We may also be consolidating data centres fairly soon and so discovering the relationships between servers would be a great bonus. As I want to make sure we migrate all the servers that talk heavily to each other as a package and we do not leave a server behind that then hammers the WAN link by talking to it's peers in the new data centre. Finally I would be interested in how the various products cope when WAN optimization is introduced into the network.

I have been looking at tools from MAZU, OpNet, NetScout and NetQoS but if anyone else has any recommendations I would be most grateful.

State of the Ferret 07/01/09

Well a belated Happy New Year to everyone. It has been a while since I have posted and that is because things have been pretty hectic with family commitments over the festive season as you can probably imagine. There were a few work commitments in there as well but studying did not go very well at all. I was trying to finish the OSPF sections in Narbik's workbook before Christmas, but I have only just got round to doing it now.

There comes a time in life where you have to face up to reality. My reality is that I am not even going to get close to being ready to do my lab in April. I have a second child on the way soon and I am only just beginning to remember how much work a new born child is. This time it will be especially challenging now that I have a toddler as well. With my wife going off on maternity leave imminently money is going to be tight and any free time I get will have to be spent focusing on doing overtime (providing it is not stopped) to make up for the shortfall in our finances. It will probably also pay to keep focused on the job a lot more in the current market, to try and ensure I do not join the massed ranks of the unemployed. So in short study time is going to be very scarce or non existent. This in turn has hit my motivation which is leading me to think I will never get round to doing the CCIE lab exam. I am trying to retain some of my knowledge by doing mini labs whenever I can but for now it looks like there will be no full scale practice labs for 6 to 8 months at least ouch :-(

On the good news front I did manage to get into the Everything IE beta but as it is confidential I cannot say anything about it at the moment.

Study Update 15/12/08

As you can probably tell from the lack of posts the studying has not been going very well as late. Work was previously taking it's toll with every piece of work being rushed in before the Christmas change freeze but now things are slowing down a bit in work due to the freeze and the fact that things generally slow down at Christmas. However the family commitments tend to pick up at this time of year so it does not look like I will get much more free time in fact family commitments tend to be even harsher than work commitments. To tell you the truth I have not been helping myself very much as I have been spending a lot of the time I should be reading the Cisco documentation browsing the web for presents or reading up on the current financial crisis and agonizing over whether it really is a good idea to buy that many presents this Christmas.

I have been plugging away at a few mini labs from Narbik's Advanced Technology Workbooks. (whoops I think I was so busy that I forgot to mention that I bought these in November just before the pound plummeted to much.) The workbooks are really good (I promise once I am through them I will compare them with the Internetwork Expert and the IPExpert workbooks) although I am taking my time getting through them. I am using Dynamips to run the workbooks so I have a topology that seems to work for the moment. I am still going through the OSPF section so I have not made great progress but I am repeating several of the mini labs to see if I can understand them a bit better.

The plan is to try and finish the OSPF section before my Christmas holiday in a weeks time and then start up again in the new year. Also I hope to get some time to setup the IPExpert Dynamips topology for my different machines, and if I get any free time over Christmas the plan it to at least hit the CCIE Command Memorizer to ensure I retain a bit of knowledge over the festive season.

In case I do not get a chance to post again best wishes to you and your families where ever you are in the world over the holiday season.

Commands: ispf

Looking through OSPF I came across a command I did not know about before. The command I came across was ispf, which stands for incremental shortest path first. The benefits of ispf can best be summed up from Cisco's own page on the topic.

OSPF uses Dijkstra's SPF algorithm to compute the shortest path tree (SPT). During the computation of the SPT, the shortest path to each node is discovered. The topology tree is used to populate the routing table with routes to IP networks. When changes to a Type-1 or Type-2 link-state advertisement (LSA) occur in an area, the entire SPT is recomputed. In many cases, the entire SPT need not be recomputed because most of the tree remains unchanged. Incremental SPF allows the system to recompute only the affected part of the tree. Recomputing only a portion of the tree rather than the entire tree results in faster OSPF convergence and saves CPU resources. Note that if the change to a Type-1 or Type-2 LSA occurs in the calculating router itself, then the full SPT is performed.

Incremental SPF is scheduled in the same way as the full SPF. Routers enabled with incremental SPF and routers not enabled with incremental SPF can function in the same internetwork.

Looks like quite a useful command to remember, so I will be adding it to my configs in future.

IPExpert Dynamips Configs

IPExpert have finally released their Dynamips configs. I have just downloaded mine from the members site so hopefully will get a chance to do a bit more labbing then I have been the last few weeks. It looks like they have 15 routers in the topology so it might be a bit difficult for me to get it all to run successfully on one PC but I will give it a go. Anyhow if you have not downloaded your files you can get them from your Internetwork Expert members page.

IPExpert Announcement Arrives

IPExpert's eagerly awaited announcement finally turned up in my inbox tonight. The main news I was interested in was the everything IE beta and the support for Dynamips. I have emailed IPExpert quite a few times in the past asking when they would introduce support for Dynamips and I was always knocked back saying it was not a Cisco supported product. So I was very happy when I saw that they were finally going to support Dynamips with their products. I was even happier when I read the announcement and found out that existing customers would get the .net topology file for free, click here for the official announcement. Oh and if you want to read the complete official announcement click here.

Update 27/11/08

Just a quick to post to say I am still around and alive. We just alive as someone decided it would be a good idea to knock me off my bike the other day. They did not even stop, they slowed down for a second and then sped off. Unfortunately the traffic lights further up the road changed just as I was running up to give them some serious abuse.

As well as being knocked off my real bike I have also been knocked off my CCIE bike over the last couple of weeks. I have been spending a lot of time doing up my house and DIY sucks up both your energy and your time. No sooner had I got all that work out the way and then my son was sick for a whole week and then to top it off I had to fly to one of our international locations for a couple of days.

So the studying has gone completely out the window. However in my foreign travels I did get to spend quite a bit of time working on the CCIE Command Memorizer and finding out how much stuff I had already forgotten. Anyhow here it to hoping I can get back on my CCIE bike next week and make some good progress in my studies.