The Ferret's Corner

WoW it has been a long time

2010-08-27T11:11:00.004+01:00

As the title of the post says it has been a long time since I have posted anything or been on this blog at all. The reason I stopped studying was that I was heavily into my CCIE study and with work and personal commitments I just did not have the time to do any blogging. I was to busy labbing away and not taking any notes, naughty boy.

Anyhow a couple of months ago my CCIE study came to an end not because I passed the lab unfortunatly but because the kids were to much of a handful for my wife to handle on her own on weekends. I do hope that not everything has fallen out of my head and that I can pick it up again sometime in the near future maybe in winter where I can trick my kids into believing it is bed time at 3pm in the afternoon :-) It will not be any time soon though because my lab is in pieces as I have decided to move house. Not only have I decided to move into a bigger more expensive house when interest rates are at their lowest levels in hundreds of years but I have also decided to move jobs and take a pay cut at the same time. Nothing like making life difficult for yourself hey? As you can see I am going stuggle with that CCIE as I am not the brightest lamp on the street :-)

On the job front I am moving away from the large enterprise and my chance of finally attending Networkers or even getting on my first Cisco course to go back to a small enterprise. Back to the land of being a jack of all trades as I will have to go back to doing Microsoft and VMWare. However maybe this I can get on the VMWare course and actually do my VCP. Also although I remember Greg Ferro saying that he thought IP Telephony was over (http://etherealmind.com/ip-telephony-over-no-cisco-voice/) (which I tend to agree with) there is a chance I can get involved in an IPT rollout and have even less focus on my R&S CCIE :-)

Talking about Greg Ferro I decided I should catch-up on all my reading and visited his blog. I noticed he is obviously a very bored man as he has now launched a podcast http://packetpushers.net/. I managed to listen to one episode and I must say it is amazing so I would highly recommend you take a listen. Also juding by his accent Greg is an Auzzie (or at least still sounds like one) I should have guessed it by the fact that he did his CCIE down there. So they must do something to the water down there because all the best CCIE's I have met have some sort of Australian connection.

So life has been pretty hectic so studying has all but died although since I only had one exam left for CCIP I thought I could at least do that and finish something off. Only trouble is it turns out my BSCI is over 3 years old now and so does not count anymore. So now I have to do the new ROUTE exam as well as MPLS to finish CCIP argh. It turns out that my BCMSN expires next month so if I did CCDP I would have to do SWITCH as well, I do not remember anyone tell me this. By the way does anyone know if the QoS exam has a time limit on it?

So thats where I am at the moment and hopefully once I have settled into my new places (job and house) I will be able to update my blog a bit more.

Narbik's Boot Camp

2009-09-29T22:03:00.003+01:00

I recently had the pleasure of attending Narbik’s boot camp (well not so recently with how long it has taken me to actually post this). What follows is my opinion of his boot camp. This is not a comparison of various boot camps as this is the first CCIE boot camp I have ever attended.

Before I go into the details of the boot camp I will explain my reasons for attending the boot camp. Work has been really busy recently and so my CCIE studies have been stalled for quite a while, so I was looking for something to help boost my motivation as well as boost my knowledge in areas that I struggled to understand. Now I have a hell of a lot of Video on Demand material and I must say I find it extremely useful even though some of the videos can drag on for a bit. (On a side note if you are a vendor who produces a VoD product please can you start chopping your videos up into more manageable sections? As I do not know anyone who has the time or inclination to sit through a 3 or 4 hour BGP video in one sitting. I just want to be able to sit down and watch a video say just on BGP filtering for 15 to 30 minutes I do not want to have to sit through 1 hour of setting up BGP first or try and scroll through a 4 hour video looking for the section I want. I want a video that is focussed on individual topics that I can easily navigate to and watch whenever I have a little bit of time.) Okay rant over so I was looking to move my studying on a bit. Now booking a boot camp was not an easy choice for me as I would have to pay for myself, so that would include accommodation and travel as well as the cost of the course, so price and location would both be big issues. The next issue was what instructor to choose, now for some reason I had already built up a mental picture of who I would want to teach me. My own shortlist for R&S was the following: Scott, Jared or Narbik. So now I had to look out for a course that was nearby (cost reasons) and would be taught by one of the previously mentioned instructors. Narbik’s course fitted the bill for me it was the cheapest course I could find, the location was good for me (even though it says London it is not really in London which is a huge result for a man on a budget as London accommodation and sustenance is ridiculously expensive.) and it was being taught by one of my shortlisted instructors. So after I bored Janet (Narbik’s wife and the course administrator) to tears with constant emails I booked the course.

Before you attend the boot camp you are sent an E-Book called the “Foundation” which I would strongly recommend you try and complete before you attend the boot camp. When you arrive at the boot camp you are no longer presented with 7 books. Now you just get two workbooks with questions only and you receive the answer book (all 2000 odd pages of it) as a secure PDF. Not all the sections of the workbook were complete when I attended the boot camp but Janet updates you with new versions of the secure PDF file while Narbik finishes the workbook.

First questions first? What is Narbik like well first off he is short and old and fat nah only joking he is much better looking than Scott Morris though :-) I get paid in free rack rentals for saying things like that :-). I read a lot of articles about Narbik being a funny guy before I went on his boot camp and I always thought to myself how the hell can he be funny this is a CCIE boot camp not a comedy class. So I really did not know what to make of him being funny but when I got to the boot camp I found out Narbik was funny he is always cracking jokes and he would have the class rolling around the floor laughing several times every day. With people from all different corners of the globe in the class it was not always easy to make people laugh but Narbik did it and he knew how to crack a joke at exactly the right time to ensure that when things were getting stressful everyone saw the funnier side of life and any tension was successfully diffused. He was helped in the comedy stakes by a great class of characters a few cheeky South African’s, a really funny mad Spaniard and the nicest French Terrorist (he is not really a Terrorist :-) ) that you could ever want to meet. There were lots of other characters in the class and everyone joined in the banter that made this by far the most enjoyable and amusing training course I have ever been on. Now do not get me wrong we did serious work in this class and Narbik does not tell jokes at the expense of his teaching. Basically I believe that people who are good at their jobs and enjoy them always have a smile on their face and an upbeat personality and that is what Narbik is incredibly good at his job and enjoying himself at the same time and that cheerful character rubs off on the class.

Narbik does not believe in using slides and he utilizes the whiteboard for all his teaching. I found it easy to adjust to this and I did not hear any complaints from the class in fact everyone seemed to revel in his teaching style and whenever someone in the class did not quite get something Narbik was able to quickly produce another diagram on the white board (when he was actually able to get his hands on some working markers that were not permanent :-) ) to quickly clarify any issues.

Day 1 was quite an easy introduction to get us into the swing of things. Firstly were the introductions were we learnt we had one real live CCIE amongst the group (he was on a reconnaissance mission to meet Narbik and scope him out as an instructor for his plan to get his second CCIE, as Narbik will be teaching the Service Provider track in the UK next year). We also learnt that there were several people in the room with labs dates in the next month and a half. Apart from the fact that there were quite a few nationalities present and the fact that the vast majority of the people on the course from the UK where self funded there was no other surprises in the introductions. As I sit here typing this with my brain mashed to **** from the intensity of the course I cannot quite remember the format of the day. It involved a lecture on switching where Narbik managed to cover in about 3 hours topics that I had spent months reading several books about. We then moved on to switching labs which we were given a couple of hours to complete. Finally to complete the day Narbik drilled us in all the issues with Frame Relay.

Day two was much more lectures than labs, we were given quite a lot of lab time on Day 1. Personally I was happier with this approach as I tend to think you can lab at home by yourself but the reason for being on the course is to listen to Narbik. The topics I seem to remember we covered were OSPF and EIGRP. Narbik explained where you would expect to see the various LSA’s in an easy to understand manner he made sure everyone understood where you saw the LSA’s could vary depending on which router was the ABR or ASBR. I thought my mind would be blown away by the lectures but surprisingly I was fairly comfortable and my brain did not go into melt down with all the information. I had done a lot of reading before the course over several years and had a pretty good understanding of OSPF before I went, but Narbik still managed to teach me new things. Then the last lecture of the day was on EIGRP and something I thought would be easy was the part that did melt my brain. The section on EIGRP filtering left me feeling completly blown away who knew there was so much to EIGRP filtering.

Day 3 was all about RIP and QoS. Once again it is the simple topics that are the ones that make you realise how much knowledge you are lacking as Narbik showed us how complicated an expert could make RIP. I had quite a bad night’s sleep the previous night so I lost concentration a bit during the last lectures of the day. This was the only time I felt really tired and struggled keeping motivated during the entire boot camp.

Day 4 we covered BGP and MPLS. Both lectures were once again very informative and enjoyable. The MPLS lecture was new for the CCIE v4 and Narbik covered the basics of MPLS as well as the complexities of setting up the various routing protocols to be vrf aware and exchange routes over an MPLS backbone.

Day 5 was the final day where we covered MLS QoS (Switch QoS) including Shaped Round Robin on the 3560. Then we covered Multicast and a topic I thought was really difficult Narbik made really easy.

Conclusions:
Before I attended Narbik’s boot camp one of my main concerns would be if I could maintain my concentration and interest throughout the course. Although I have never been on a Cisco course before I have been on several other training courses including some very interesting Microsoft and VMWare courses but during all those courses there were points where I lost interest and the will to live. I just wanted the course to be over. On this course that never happened apart from the end of the Wednesday where I was really tired and lost concentration a bit. I would gladly have sat in class till 2 in the morning listening to Narbik. He is such an excellent teacher that I felt constantly engaged during the course and the week absolutely flew by.

People seem to rave on about Narbik’s unconventional teaching style in that he does not use slides but I do not think it is unconventional to me it is proper teaching and it is a sad indictment of other training courses if not using slides is considered such a big thing. It is not called “Death by Powerpoint” for nothing and the lack of slides is probably one of the major reasons I managed to stay engaged throughout the course. Think about it as well if you think you know something really well just wait till someone asks you a question about it even a CCNA level question, although you understand the concept in your head unless you really know the material inside out you will struggle to explain it to someone else. Now if you were a trainer teaching a course where you were using a slide show the information is right there in front of you, if you were unsure on a section unless you had a real know it all in the class you could probably muddle through. However on the other hand if you are teaching with no props, no slideshow to keep you on track then you need to have a complete mental picture of the material you are presenting in your head. To have that mental picture in your head you need to have a complete mastery of the material you are presenting. That is what Narbik has he can write up IOS commands on the board with all the options from memory, he can make topics that others struggle to explain seem simple, he has that complete mastery of the material.

I guess the acid test of the whole thing is if you had to pay again to attend the course again would you? I can honestly say it was the best money I have spent on my CCIE training so far. It was by far the most enjoyable and interesting course I have ever been on in my life. When Narbik is back in the UK I will definitely be utilizing my option of a free re-take and attending his course again.

Narbik Bootcamp

2009-08-05T22:54:00.003+01:00

So I have been pretty busy with work and family to do much blog posting these days, but I do have one bit of news. I have decided to take the plunge take out a loan and book Narbik's boot camp in September. Hopefully it will give my CCIE studies the shot in the arm they require.

As it is my hard earned cash (well soon to be earned cash) that I am putting up for this boot camp any tips from anyone who has attended has for getting the most out of the experience would be gratefully received. Also does anyone know the laptop and software requirements for the boot camp?

CCIE Command Memorizer MPLS

2009-06-04T23:24:00.003+01:00

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

2009-04-25T18:03:00.005+01:00

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

2009-04-17T00:11:00.004+01:00

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

2009-01-19T21:13:00.003Z

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

2009-01-07T22:15:00.003Z

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

2008-12-15T22:11:00.003Z

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

2008-12-09T22:54:00.003Z

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

2008-12-09T22:46:00.003Z

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

2008-12-03T22:31:00.002Z

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

2008-11-27T23:08:00.001Z

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.

CCIE Shorts 16/11/08

2008-11-16T18:51:00.002Z

Work and my personal life have conspired to get on top of me the last few weeks and stop my blogging and studying. Anyhow I am still alive just and making a little bit of progress when ever I have some free time. Hopefully with the Christmas change freeze on the way work should be less of an issue in a few weeks. Anyhow to get my used to blogging again I thought I would post on some CCIE shorts that I wanted to get up but have not had the chance.

Firstly the CCIE Command Memorizer has been up dated. As well as the usual fixes the major new functionality is that you can finish your command with the Enter (Return) key rather than the Tab key. Apparently there was a lot of requests for this functionality which is why another update was rushed out so soon after the previous one. I never had any problems using the Tab key in fact I got used to it fairly quickly but I will let you know how I get on with the new version. I must admit I have not had much time to use the Command Memorizer as work has been very hectic and my normal routine was to spend 30 minutes a day at lunchtime using it. At the moment thought 30 minutes at lunch seems a distant memory so I have not had a chance to use it for at least 2 weeks. There has also been a subscription version of the Command Memorizer released, which Cisco Network Engineer has the details of.

I also noticed that IPExpert are having a Christmas sale and the BLS is back down to $999. The most exciting part of the sale for me though is that the rack rental sessions have been reduced in price. I still wish they would sort out some rack rental times that worked a bit better for Europe but at the price they are at the moment they are well worth investigating. Anyhow click here to check out the sale.

I have not had a chance to check out the latest Internetwork Expert news but hopefully I will get a chance in the next few days. I have been trying to justify the $1800 upgrade to the end-to-end program but with the value of the pound at the moment the chances of me being able to justify it diminish by the day.

Hopefully I will have a chance to do a study update in the next few days and get some good technical posts going but do not hold your breath at the moment :-)

Project 1:

2008-11-09T20:36:00.003Z

I have been asked to help out on a little project for a friend and as I am not really up to date on all the wireless technologies out there I thought I would do a post to see if anyone else has any ideas.

Basically what I have been asked to do is setup is an outdoor back link to a primary satellite link. There will be a router probably Cisco as I believe they do ruggedised routers (any help on models greatly appreciated) which will be connected to a satellite link. The satellite link will be the primary connection used by a control station to connect to remote sensors in the field. What I need to do is provide a backup link for when the satellite link fails. The only time there should be any problems with the satellite link is when it is absolutely pouring with rain which tends to happen quite a lot on this island. I was looking into GPRS or 3G and at the moment GPRS is my favourite as Cisco have released a new GPRS card for their ISR routers. The initial plan is to connect to the remote sensors over the satellite link and then use the IP SLA service to check that the other end of the link is up. If the satellite link fails then I would want to fail over to the GRPS or 3G connection to make sure that the control station could still connect to the remote sensors.

So I have a couple of questions to anyone who know about these technologies or has setup similar systems. Firstly can you bond GRPS together to get a higher bandwidth connection with a Cisco router? Also how do GRPS and 3G perform in poor weather conditions? Any help out ruggedised routers and outdoor routing systems would be most appreciated.

Study Update 03/11/08

2008-11-03T22:39:00.004Z

Okay so it has been a while since I posted a study update. As usual things have not been going to plan, I am still working a lot of hours which I need to do because of the overtime money I earn. This plays havoc with my study schedule because even if the change is taking place at 10:30 I have to get everything ready before that and so it completely disrupts my night of studying when ever I have to do a change.

I have however finally managed to finish the first week of the Internetwork Expert CoD I must have the record for taking the longest amount of time to finish the first week. I still have another week of the CoD to go which is probably going to take forever as well. I do find that some of the videos in both the Internetwork Expert and IPExpert CoD's are so long that I keep losing focus and I have to re-watch parts. I think that both IPExpert and Internetwork Expert really should think about cutting their videos down in to more manageable sections like CBT Nuggets do. (Internetwork Expert did announce they would be doing this in their CCIE 2.0 CoD's).

On the labbing front I have been working on some of the IPExpert Volume 1 labs which tend to kick my butt when I first try them. I do improve a lot when I have done at least one lab in a section but when I try the first lab in a new section/technology then I spend quite a bit of time stuck in the Proctor Guide. As I do not have a rack I have been using some Proctor Lab sessions to do the labs. The times the Proctor Lab sessions run are not the most convenient and I was getting up at 5 in the morning to work on the racks. However with the change of the clocks those sessions would now start at 4 in the morning my time which I can assure you is not very pleasant when it is cold and dark. I will have to look and see if the US clocks are going to change anytime soon or maybe Proctor Labs could think about changing some of the rack times to suit Europe and the rest of the world a little bit better.

I have not had much time for reading or spending on the Command Memorizer but I hope to do a bit more reading on BGP and get some more time on the Memorizer later this week. So the report at the moment is that I am treading water but I am still in the fight :-)

Splashing Out Some More

2008-10-31T22:51:00.003Z

Okay so I managed to get the discount code for the Internetwork Expert Dynamips Volume 1 labs the other night, and finally took the plunge and made the purchase. I intend to work my way through the Volume 1 lab which is rated a 5 this next week just to get an idea of where I am.

As I previously mentioned I was looking for something to boost my mastery of the individual technologies and so I tried to contact Micronics training 3 times via email. Narbik might write excellent workbooks but no one at Micronics seems to want to sell them to me as I do not recieve 1 reply. So I got a bit fed up and after last nights announcement decided to investigate upgrading to the Internetwork Expert end-to-end program instead. After contacting a very helpful IE sales rep I got a quote for my upgrade and although they discount my existing products the bill was still a little bit steeper than I was expecting (My maths must be worse than I thought as they do publish all their figures) especially when you are paying for the training yourself. (Hint to myself I might have to move back to South Africa and apply for the developing world discount that is if SA gets it :-) ) So now I am pushed back to thinking about Narbiks books so does anyone know of the best way to get hold of a sales rep from Micronics?

Peace at Last?

2008-10-31T21:32:00.003Z

Just as I was about to do a post about how boring the CCIE vendor wars were becoming and that it was time for all the vendors to put their handbags away, it looks like peace has returned to CCIE training land. I did read a good post by Wayne Lawson on his view on the Cisco 360 program and then read Matt Brooks reply to Internetwork Expert's CCIE 2.0 announcement video. While Matt did raise some valid points about contradictions in Brain Dennis announcement, I think most people who listened to the broadcast would have realised that Brian was passionate about his company and probably not sticking to a prepared script, so there were bound to be some contradictions in his statements. While the CCIE training wars were amusing at first, it did become boring rather quickly and I think this really excellent post from Brandon Carroll sums things up. Now children get back to what you both do best namely producing top quality training for your customers and we will decide who the best training company is!

Oops!... They Did It Again

2008-10-30T22:41:00.002Z

Okay so I missed the Internetwork Expert live announcement but I used my valuable study time to watch the recorded session and I am glad to say it was well worth it.

There has been plenty of new about the Cisco 360 program but in my opinion Internetwork Experts announcement is even bigger news, especially if they pull off even half of the things that were mentioned in the video. If they do they will blow Cisco's 360 program out of the water.

For those of you that do not feel like sitting through the video I will go through the high points for me.

IE tried to work with Cisco they tried everything they could to partner with Cisco but they just could not agree. It seems to work with Cisco IE would have paid a very high price, they would have had to have become a Cisco Learning Partner (CLP) to join the 360 program. Being a CLP means you cannot sell or market outside of your region so that would be North America (NA) in IE's case which would have been very bad for me, a whole heap of other people, and IE themselves as 50% of IE's customer base is outside of NA. They would have had to scrap their existing products and utilized the authorised training materials. As well as this the emerging markets discounts and the whole ethos of the company would have had to have changed.

So the Brians (I did not realise what a big Cisco fanboy Brian Dennis is wait till you hear his product evaluation process :-) ) and consequently IE have decided to go it alone. Great decision I say as I never wanted IE to join the 360 program anyway, and based on all the reasons stated in the product announcement it seems it was a no brainer from IE's point of view.

So what are they doing to compete with the 360 program, well they are releasing their CCIE 2.0 program. (Why does everyone use this 2.0 crap I get so bored of reading about Web 2.0 and I have no fecking clue what it is really about, besides if IE deliver they should call their program CCIE 3.0 because that is how far ahead of everything else out there it is.) So what is the CCIE 2.0 program all about well there are loads of components some of which I will list below :

They will release perpetual product updates and so sections will be released as they are done. Easier for IE as for example individual labs can be released as they are ready rather than having to wait for 10 or 20 labs to be complete to release a whole workbook. It is great news for the customer as well as will will keep getting constantly updated content.
They will release assessment products that recommend what areas you need to brush up on and what products and books will help you.
There will be a new series of CoD's that will sit between the current two CoDs that delves much deeper into individual topics in 15 to 30 and maybe 40 minute sections (about time somebody realised that 45 minutes is about the longest most people can pay attention for and that 3 hour videos are not really the best thing for working people)
You will have access to instructor drop in sessions where you can join an instructor online and watch them do a lab or join in a class (good for seeing the different approaches of the different instructors)
Printed products and DVD's will still be available they will just be a snapshot of the product release at certain time periods.
Polymorphic labs (Poly-Labs) will be available that will expose your weak points and ensure that you find the areas you are not a hot shot. (these sound awesome)
They will have customer relationship managers that get in touch with you and see how you are getting on (Personal Trainers for the CCIE world, work those labs baby work those labs :-) )
A service that recommends which parts of the documentation or Ciscopress books you need to read to brush up on areas you do not understand or are weak in.
There will be associate and professional level training released in the future (CCNA, CCNP, CCVP, etc)

There is a lot more to it (might be best to watch the video I am rubbish at summarising things) but they main problem they are trying to solve with this program is probably the most difficult thing about studying for the CCIE namely "where are you in your studies and where are you going/needing to go". The dynamic feedback mechanisms, contact with instructors and assessment products are designed to give you this feedback and therefore save you time in preparing for the CCIE. (I almost think they wrote this whole program especially for me, because I am stuck in "where am I and where am I going land". As well as the fact anything that cuts down the number of hours I need to study for the CCIE and consequently reduce the complaints about how much time I spend on my computer has to be very good thing for my marriage at least :-) )

The last point to mention is that all this stuff is available free of charge to people who have purchased the end-to-end program. For those of us (I am included in this) who have some of the products you will be able to upgrade to the end-to-end program and receive discounts for the products you already own. If you do not need all the extra stuff (the instructor interaction, Poly Tech labs and all that jazz) your existing products will still be upgraded free of charge under the investment protection program.

One final thing if you are planning on doing your CCIE Voice order IE's Voice CoD + Workbooks now and Brian D will upgrade you to the full Voice end-to-end program when it is released which will save you some major cash. (By the way he does say this in the video but please double check with IE before you buy just to be on the safe side).

I am hugely excited about this news and am now thinking of which of my wife's jewelry I can sell to raise the funds to get my account upgraded to the end-to-end program. On second thoughts I better think of something of my own to sell as touching let alone selling my wife's stuff is a LTM (Life Threatening Move).

CCIE Shorts 27/10/08

2008-10-27T23:04:00.003Z

I was supposed to do this post on the weekend but some how I lost it in Blogger somewhere. Thanks to cciepursuit I learnt more about Cisco's CCIE 360 training program. The main thing is it looks like the 360 program will be utilizing the NetMasterClass materials. This was a bit of a relief to me as I was worried that there would Cisco would be producing training materials that would virtually ensure that if you used their materials you would pass the exam. This fear has thankfully proved unfounded, but my belief that Cisco was in this for the money rather than for than their claimed higher calling of cleaning up the CCIE training market seems to have been correct. It looks like they are putting a 100% mark up on the NetMasterClass products according to ccieguru. Anyhow if you want to read the full scoop on the CCIE 360 program head over to cciepursuit who has a very informative post on the whole thing. I swear the man missed his true calling in life he should have been an investigative journalist :-)

In other news cciepursuit (who else) has pointed out that the Internetwork Expert Scholarship program is back on. So if you can think of a brilliant essay on why you want to be a CCIE send it to me so I can apply :-) No seriously this is a great opportunity so head over to the Internetwork Expert site to apply.

Finally the other news I forgot to post about is that David Bomball released a new version of the CCIE Command Memorizer about a week ago. It might have been two weeks ago but unfortunately his email got caught in my spam folder and I did not check it for a few days. Anyhow the new version as well as some fixes includes new sections on DHCP and Miscellaneous Commands. I have upgraded to the new version but have not had much of a chance to use it yet due to work being hectic, boy I am looking forward to the Christmas change freeze :-) Anyhow once I have played with it for a bit I will share my experiences with you.

Technologies Workbook Advice

2008-10-26T18:07:00.003Z

A reader of my blog (yup it surprises me to but it turns out there is quite a lot of them, must be a lot of very bored people in the world :-) ) asked me my opinion on whether if you had the IPExpert BLS it was worth getting the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 workbook. So rather than reply in the comments field I thought I would do a long winded post on the topic :-)

Before I start and I hate the fact that the world has come to this, let me add my disclaimer. What will follows is my opinion and my opinion has been formed by using both the Internetwork Expert and the IPExpert Volume 1 workbooks as well as reading about and sampling some of the other workbooks. I am happy for you to disagree with my conclusion if you are nice and polite but if you cannot do me that courtesy then well you can *&%$ off in the nicest possible way of course :-) Also I have no interest in joining the CCIE vendor wars so please do not drag me into them.

First I will go through the history of my product purchases to try and give you some insight into how I have formed my opinions. I bought the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 workbook while doing my CCNP to help give some structure to my labbing for the CCNP.

Then later in the year I bought the original IPExpert Volume 9 material because they were having a sale where they included their original CoD as well as the audio bootcamp and the printed workbooks (in my opinion unless you have access to a big printer or are happy to read off a computer screen all day the electronic workbooks are a false economy) for round about $600. Although I was not ready at the time I had just finished my CCNP and had not even looked at the CCIE written material, the dollar was nice and weak and so it seemed to good a deal to pass up. I was away on holiday when the material was delivered and then I was working quite extensively on QoS (I must not be normal because QoS is my favourite topic :-) ) when I got back, so I did not look at the material for quite a while. When I did decide to look into the material I found the going a bit tough.

IPExpert took the approach of offering 18 mini labs on the various technologies at this time and this is still the approach they take although the mini labs are up to 22 and they have been changed quite significantly. Now the IPExpert approach seems to be to throw you in at the deep end, with wording and restrictions similar to what you would expect on a full scale lab, except that these are technology focused mini labs. For me this was a bit overwhelming at first and along with the fact that I did not have a home lab to run all this stuff on I decided to go back to the Internetwork Expert volume 1 lab.

Internetwork Expert approach their Volume 1 labs (I am talking about version 4.1 here) in a different way. They give you a bit more hand holding to get you up to speed and this is what I needed. The other bonus was that you can run their Volume 1 labs (except switching) on Dynamips and they give you the Dynamips topology to do this. The downside to the Internetwork Expert stuff was that some of the labs were to simple and the explanations seemed to disappear the further you got through the various labs. In fact the explanations are not up to the standard of the other workbook vendors. However the good news is that Internetwork Expert seemed to have realised this and are working on version 5 of the Volume 1 workbook. A lot of the version 5 sections are now available in a beta form and if you purchased the version 4.1 volume 1 workbook you get immediate access to them without having to pay any more money.

My situation at the moment is that I am working on both the Internetwork Expert labs in Dynamips and using some of my Proctor labs sessions to do the IPExpert stuff. I still get stumped on a lot of the IPExpert stuff and refer to the solutions guide more than I would like. However it is teaching me the thinking involved in the CCIE lab and how to use the documentation to look things up. As for the Internetwork Expert stuff I am mainly working on the version 4.1 stuff till I can get near a printer to print out the new version 5 labs that have been released. I have also been having some problems getting the initial configurations to work in Dynamips which is slowing things down.

So now we have been around the houses a bit back to the original question. If you have the IPExpert BLS would you recommend purchasing the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 workbook?

The answer is it depends how comfortable are you doing the IPExpert Volume 1 labs and what are your timescales for completing the CCIE lab?

If you are struggling like I was with the IPExpert stuff and are in no rush to get your CCIE, then I would recommend Internetwork Expert as your second vendor. The version 5 labs are a huge improvement on the version 4.1 labs. They have detailed explanations and notes in the solutions sections which is what I have been looking for all along. When version 5 is finished and providing the standard of all the other sections matches what I have seen so far, then I am sure Internetwork Expert's Volume 1 workbooks will be right at the top of the introductory lab workbooks pile. However the problem is that they are still in development and that's why I say if you are in no rush to get your CCIE because I am not sure what the timescales for completion are.

However if you do not want to wait around and you own either IPExpert or Internetwork Expert Volume 1 workbooks then I do not recommend you buy the other vendor's products. Based on the samples I have seen and what I have read on the other blogs the best Volume 1 level workbook to teach you the technologies out there at the moment is the Advanced CCIE Routing and Switching - Technology Focused Workbook by Narbik Kocharians. It is a workbook that I am seriously considering buying even though I really cannot afford it and have shelled out on enough CCIE training material already. You only have to look at the sample pages on the Micronics website to see the level of detail Narbik goes into in his explanations (in my opinions when you are trying to master a technology explanations and show commands that show you how to verify things are the most important component of any level 1 workbook). Then there is the best recommendation of all the fact that three newly minted CCIE's (Ethan, Baroq and Matt Hill) recommend it.

Splashing Out

2008-10-26T11:01:00.003Z

Okay so the other night I decided to splash out and buy the Dynamips workbooks from Internetwork Expert. In some way I feel a bit conned because I already own the proper Volume 2 workbook and even though you get a discount for this, the fact that they divide the workbook into two still means you end up paying $195 for a slightly different product. If I was not so lazy I could probably have got away without needing to get the Dynamips versions but I could not face the hassle of re-engineering the Volume 2 workbook. I still need to get a voucher code so I can get the the first part of the Dynamips workbook. I also ordered a printed copy of the Volume 3 workbook because the printing facilities in my new job are not as accommodating as those in my old job :-) My old job was great for printing we had a whole department dedicated to printing and you got these lovely productions back. Even there though they started installing print monitoring software, big brother is every where these days :-)

It was the plummeting value of the pound that really forced my hand as I was looking into getting Nabriks Advanced Technology Workbook. However no one from Micronics replied to my email and as the pound fell faster than Aussie wickets in the second test (if it was falling as fast as English wickets do then we would be in serious trouble :-) ) it would have been too expensive anyhow. Besides I probably need to stay focused on the products I have.

I did receive a comment asking me if I would recommend getting the Internetwork Volume 1 material if you already have the IPExpert BLS and I though instead of just replying in a comment I would do a blog post later on today about this.

Now if you excuse me I am going to entertain myself for a few more minutes by reading about the cat fight between IPExpert and Internetwork Expert that Ethereal Mind pointed out. He did make a comment on Twitter that it was like watching $20 hookers fighting it out on a street corner over a punter which I must object to. I as CCIE mendicant (yes I had to look it up as well) feel I am a bit classier than being fought over by $20 hookers, $50 dollar ones at least :-)

WTF??? Policing a Priority Queue

2008-10-23T23:33:00.004+01:00

I was looking at how QoS on our routers at work is configured and I came across the following:

Policy Map QOS-OUT
Class VOICE-OUT
Strict Priority
Bandwidth 2700 (kbps) Burst 337500 (Bytes)
police cir 2712000 bc 339000 be 339000
conform-action set-dscp-transmit ef
exceed-action drop

Now I was confused I had always thought that you did not need to police on a priority queue because policing was built in to the priority command. The way I understood it was that as soon as you typed priority and then the bandwidth, that was the maximum bandwidth that would be allocated to the priority queue and so there was no need for a policer. Am I wrong has anyone else seen this configuration before? Is it normal and a case of what is actually used in the real world rather than what you learn from Ciscopress? Also which command would take precedence the police or the priority command if you set them to different rates?

When I asked why it was setup this way, I was told the police command was better for producing logging as the priority command just dropped packets and did not tell you if your priority traffic was exceeding the bandwidth you had provisioned. Therefore you would not know if you needed to increase your priority queue bandwidth. At first I accepted this explanation but then when I thought about it a bit more and did a show policy-map interface I got the information below.

Class-map: VOICE-OUT (match-any)
151522 packets, 13014864 bytes
30 second offered rate 0 bps, drop rate 0 bps
Match: ip dscp ef (46)
151140 packets, 13001580 bytes
30 second rate 0 bps
Match: access-group name VOICE-OUT
382 packets, 13284 bytes
30 second rate 0 bps
Queueing
Strict Priority
Output Queue: Conversation 264
Bandwidth 2700 (kbps) Burst 337500 (Bytes)
(pkts matched/bytes matched) 25068/1912731
(total drops/bytes drops) 0/0
police:
cir 2712000 bps, bc 339000 bytes
conformed 151522 packets, 13014864 bytes; actions:
set-dscp-transmit ef
exceeded 0 packets, 0 bytes; actions:
drop
conformed 0 bps, exceed 0 bps

Which to me showed that the priority command does show how many packets/bytes have been dropped. So I do not think logging would be the reason for adding the police command as well. I am leaning towards misconfiguration at the moment, but I would love to hear from people with more QoS experience than me to explain what is going on here.

CCIE Shorts: Congratulations Matt Hill

2008-10-22T22:04:00.003+01:00

The "I want to be a CCIE" blogging community seems to get smaller every day as more and more bloggers move into the illustrious "I am a CCIE" category. Anyhow Matt Hill is the latest to join their ranks so head over to his blog to congratulate him and read what must be the best post on someones lab experience I have ever read :-)

Training

2008-10-20T23:11:00.003+01:00

Training seems to be the theme of the moment in CCIE blog land. What with Cisco launching their own 360 degree training program and bloggers like Greg at Etherealmind talking about the value of certifications versus experience. Ivan at IOS Hints and Tips also did a great post on the different ways people get knowledge. I did get to try out one of NIL's CCNA labs when Ivan was looking for beta testers and I was very impressed. If my company ever decided to purchase some training courses for me they would definitely be one of the vendors I would check out.

On the training theme IPExpert have just released their latest newsletter which if you do not subscribe to you can read by clicking here. They have finally launched their CICE blog site and there is the usual list of special offers in the newsletter. There is also a report by the Tolly Group comparing Internetwork Expert versus IPExpert. I always wonder why companies still pay for these reports as I do not know anyone who takes them seriously.

I love lines like this "While this is a head-to-head review, the Tolly Group did not contact Internetwork Expert about it's product, because information utilized came directly from the company website." Lines like that just make me laugh. Anyway to save you all some time and because I needed a good laugh (studying is not going so well these days to many changes to be managed for work) I read the report so you did not have to. To summarise the report says both companies offer great training (which I can confirm since I use them both, however I have not passed my CCIE yet so there is obviously room for improvement :-) ) but that IPExpert is more cost effective.

To me there does not seem to be a great deal of difference in price between the two vendors, however there was one comment I do agree with. Namely the information on the rack rentals. It states that IPExpert tends to be more expensive for the rack rentals (which is why you should always buy their rack rentals when they have the double rack time special offers on) but that they tend to be easier to book. Where as Internetwork Expert rack time can be bought for less money, but trying to get a rack at short notice can be a bit of a problem. My personal experience does tie up with that view and I do prefer the fact that the IPExpert sessions are longer given that you normally lose up to half an hour just logging on to the rack and getting everything setup.

The other thing I did notice on the report that was a bit strange since it was about cost effectiveness was that it did not mention Dynamips. Probably because Internetwork Expert are the only ones with a Dynamips product :-). The cost savings of using only Dynamips are huge compared to renting rack time and it seems more and more people are passing using only Dynamips or at the very least using a lot less rack time because of it.

Finally the other thing to report on the training front is that Internetwork Expert are taking registrations for their Beta Assessment Lab which is designed to asses your knowledge of key topics and technologies. Apparently it will provide you with a study plan and recommend Internetwork Expert products to suit your needs. I have registered in the hope I get accepted and that it is ready to begin testing fairly soon.

CCIE Study Update 15/10/08

2008-10-15T23:05:00.003+01:00

Okay so it is a little while since I have managed to post a study update. My studying seems very disjointed at the moment as some days I make good progress and the next couple of days disappear in the hectic world of work and family life. Work is the real pain at the moment as all our changes need to take place in the evenings and the evenings are the only time I get to study. However with the credit crunch looking like it is beginning to bite the real economy, I feel it would be a serious mistake to turn down the overtime money at the moment. Besides I need it to pay off all the IPExpert rack sessions I have bought. I bought another 10 sessions the other day and got 10 more free using this special offer which ends Friday 17th October.

Although my studying has been a bit haphazard I have managed to achieve a few of my goals. I have finally finished watching all the IPExpert BLS videos, although I am not quite sure how much of it all I took in. I hope to get a review posted fairly soon if time allows but I can say over all I was very impressed. There are a few areas that could do with some work, the sound especially springs to mind, but I will cover all that in my review.

I also tried out a Proctor Labs session and that was good experience as well, apart from the fact that I had to get out of bed at 5 in the morning to start my session. Learning to sit still for 8 hours at a time also looks like it might be a bit of a challenge. I spent most of my time configuring switches which was good but even on some simple tasks I was looking at the solution guide a bit to much. Also since my workbooks are all in electronic format trying to divide the screen up got a bit annoying.

I also began work on changing the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 version 5 initial configuration files to work with Dynamips. I did need some tips from a helpful poster on the Internetwork Expert forums but things seem to be progressing well on that front. Finally I have still been trying to drum the BGP configuration commands into my head using the CCIE Command Memorizer whenever I can.

There is still a lot more to do but I am content that I am at least moving forward even if it is only inches at a time. Hopefully things will begin to stick in my head soon and I will get some more free time so I can step up the pace a bit more.

CCIE Shorts 14/10/08

2008-10-14T23:38:00.003+01:00

Okay first of all a belated congratulations to Jo Knight of CCIE Lab Preparation who managed to pass his CCIE on the 7th of October. Nice one well done Jo I have been meaning to write a post to congratulate you but work got in the way of blogging time. Anyhow if you move at the speed of a sloth like me then head over to his blog to congratulate him, or if you are yawning that is old news like most of you probably will be then make sure you check out his great posts on the lab. He even has a post on what he is planning to learn next which includes Turkish. Turkish or some other foreign language is what my brain seems to think half the IOS commands are written in :-). Anyhow nice one well done Jo!!

Next thing of interest that seems to be going on in CCIE land is the fact that Cisco is introducing it's own CCIE training program. Thanks to CCIE pursuit for pointing this out to me, head over to his blog to check out the full story. Now this is big news in my opinion and so is the fact that Cisco wants 3 million certified engineers by 2012 up from 1 million now.

Both the Cisco CCIE training program and the 3 million certified engineers are something I disagree with. According to the various articles Cisco is designing the program to compete head on with 3rd party bootcamps that are not up to par. So I wonder which 3rd party bootcamps are not up to par? Most of vendors that people seem to use in passing their CCIE's seem to have been up to scratch, as how have some many people passed their CCIE's up until this point?

Companies like Cisco and Microsoft survive and prosper because they have millions of smaller companies supporting their products and providing innovative products/solutions that address the short comings in their own products. Now when the demands for growth mean the Cisco and Microsoft's of this world start eating their own children so to speak then I get a bit upset. Innovation and product improvements do not generally come from large companies they come from small companies that spot a niche in the market. So surely these smaller companies should be rewarded by the corporate giants for supporting them rather than being trampled all over. I mean how much can the CCIE training market be worth to Cisco? Surely not that much where as to companies like IPExpert and Internetwork Expert it is their livelyhood. Also as soon as the corporate giant has established a monopoly in an area then they tend to innovate less which is bad for us consumers.

The other worry I have with Cisco entering the CCIE training market is will they develop a course that spoonfeds candidates? Previously Cisco guarded the intergrity of the CCIE and they did not actually produce any training material for it (oaky a few Ciscopress books aside). However now they have a program to sell they will obviously want to sell more of their training courses than the competition. So one of the best ways to do this is to have a higher pass rate than the competition and if you write the exam and the training material does this not mean that you might be tempted to load your training material with all the information to pass the CCIE? So could the commercial pressure of Cisco wanting to sell training programs lead to their program becoming a complete this course and you will be guarenteed of passing your CCIE type of program?

Would Cisco devalue the CCIE in this way? Do they really care about the CCIE or are they just intrested in getting as many engineers out there as possible who have knowledge of their products and thus act as marketers for their products? I mean why target a specfic number of engineers you want to produce? Instead of setting a target of 3 million engineers why do they not instead insist on improving the quality of the engineers they certify? I do not know what everyone else's experiences are but whenever a company I have worked for has wanted to recruit a new engineer we have never starved for lack of candidates. We have however had severe droughts of quality candidates. Even people who work at Cisco have admitted to me their problem is not the lack of candidates it is the lack of quality people. So what does everyone else think is this a good move by Cisco? Is there a shortage of engineers or is it the quality of the engineers that is in short supply?

Finally as for the demise of the USA that Network World seems to go on about in my opinion that is still a long way off. There is a inovative streak and a remarkable capcaity to reinvent itself in the eagle that the dragon and the tiger with their billion strong populations still have not achieved. On day they will get there but I do not think the US will be brushed aside just yet. Besides the US is still growing and it could hit half a billion people fairly soon, but I digress mental note to self this is a CCIE blog not a currnet affairs blog :-)

Questions Questions and more Questions

2008-10-08T19:18:00.005+01:00

I am struggling a bit at the moment to get my studies to have some structure. I really want to nail the technologies before I move on to full scale labs but then I wonder if it is better to try out some of the easy labs and that will help identify my weaknesses. What did everyone else do? Does anyone think it is worthwhile trying a low difficulty full scale lab just to help identify my weaknesses or do you think I should know how to configure everything backwards before I even try a full multiprotocol lab?

I have also been having some problems getting Dynamips to work properly with the new IE volume 1 version 5 labs. Has anyone else got these to work ? The main problems I have is with the initial configs for the various labs and in particular the switches. I have modified the router interfaces and that is all fine but what do I need to do with the switch configs? I could probably look at the various labs and work it out but as that would take study time I would prefer the easy approach of finding out if anyone else had set it up and what they did. So if you know and are prepared to help then please let me know.

The other thing I wanted to know about is Nabrik's workbooks. I am probably fine with all the material I have at the moment and should not be spending anymore money on CCIE study materials in the current climate. However after all the good things I read about Nabrik, I wonder if it will be worth buying his workbooks. So if anyone has used them then please can you let me know what you think of them and if they are worth buying if you already have IPExpert and Internetwork Expert? Also what do people do with setting up their labs for Nabrik's workbooks can you do most of it in Dynamips, do you use your own equipment, or is there any good cheap rack rentals for them?

CCIE Shorts 05/10/08

2008-10-05T08:39:00.004+01:00

First the bad news as you have probably already heard cciepursuit did not pass his lab on his first attempt. I was convinced he would pass and after following his blog religiously for over a year, he was the blogger I most wanted to pass. Anyhow he did not make it first time although I am convinced he will make it in January. It does show that this CCIE thing is no walk in the park and no matter how well prepared you are you could end up with a lab that hits all your weak points or as in cciepursuits case hits you with question interpretation issues. I have a hard enough time interpreting some of Cisco's normal exam questions so I dread to think what the CCIE will be like. Anyhow head over to cciepursuits blog to give him some encouragement for his next attempt.

On a happier note South African Networker passed his written. I am envious at the amount of time he has to study as he only works part time, (with the credit crunch a few more of us might find ourselves in that position soon, although I am not keen on unpaid study time :-) ) so he has managed to put in some fearsome hours. Anyhow head over to his blog by clicking here to congratulate him.

The other thing to mention is there should be an update of the CCIE Command Memorizer coming later this week that I am looking forward to. I will let you know some more on what has changed later in the week.

Finally Internetwork Expert have released a partial release of the new Version 5 IP Services section so I look forward to trying it out. By the way what does everyone else do with their electronic access workbooks do they print them out themselves or do they order the printed version? I need hard copies of a couple of my workbooks and I am not sure which is the best approach at the moment, so I thought I would find out what everyone else does.

Study Update 01/10/08

2008-10-01T22:33:00.003+01:00

Apologies for the lack of updates but I only landed back in the country yesterday and did not really feel like posting. Before that I was in Zimbabwe for a few days and considering that their computers at the airport have been down for over a year, and I almost could not get on the plane because I had not printed my ticket. I was not going to be posting much from there. Besides I was enjoying some fishing as well as time with my family as we said our final farewells to my dad. Anyhow maybe more on that some other time.

As for the little bits of study I have been doing. It mainly consists of working my way through the IPExpert CoD and I have a little bit of day 4 and all of day 5 still to watch. It has been a really great learning experience. I have picked up a lot of tips that I think will really help me in my journey and my career. Once I finish it and week two of the Internetwork Expert CoD I hope to be able to do a review between both products.

Apart from watching videos the only other thing I have been doing is hammering the BGP sections in the CCIE Command Memorizer. When I come across a command I do not know I look it up on the Cisco website and try it out on Dynamips. There have been quite a few commands that are taking a while to get through my thick skull. However I believe the experience has been worthwhile and when you do not have a lot of time on your hands the CCIE Command Memorizer is about the best thing I have to make me feel like I have actually done something. I need to be in the right frame of mind and have total silence to read a book. I need silence and setup time to do a lab even a Dynamips one. The CoD videos tend to be quite long. So all I am left with is practice questions and the memorizer and that's what I use when I have a spare couple of minutes.

I need to schedule some longer time slots over the coming weeks but at the moment I am still sorting out all the paperwork that arrived while I was away. So I will probably be pretty quiet on the study front till next week.

Written Study Materials

2008-09-24T10:11:00.004+01:00

Well I have been threatening to type up a post on what I used to prepare for my written for a while so here goes.

I consider my written study to have begun when I started working on my CCNP at the beginning of 2007. I think the CCNP course is a great building block for moving onto the CCIE and I would recommend following the certification pyramid to anyone who was new to the industry. I would also caution you not to rush through the exams no matter how tempting it may be to achieve your CCNP. Anyhow I digress, the material in the BSCI and BCMSN courses is especially relevant to the CCIE written and the CCIE lab in my opinion.

So the books I used for it where
Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks (BSCI): Authorized Self-study Guide (CCNP Self-study) This is my opinion is a great book and a really enjoyable read. I see a lot of people using the Certification Guide instead of this book because the Cert Guide is much thinner and so they will finish quicker :-) However if you are new to the topics I would recommend this book rather than the Certification Guide. I read this book cover to cover and tried out all the labs inside as well.

Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks (BCMSN) (Authorized Self-study Guide) I found this book really hard going it was not easy to read and did not seem to flow to me. This book was a real struggle to get through and it took me ages to finish. I was not keen on this book at the time but as time has passed my feelings towards it have mellowed. It has some really good information in it that applies to real life as well as certification exams. Also it is listed in the additional reading sections of the CCIE Written Certification Guide. I read the book cover to cover but did not manage to try out all the labs due to equipment restraints.

CCNP BCMSN Official Exam Certification Guide (CCNP Self-Study) I read this book cover to cover as well to try and make sense of some of the stuff in the Self -Study guide. This book was a lot easier to follow, however for the BCMSN exam it is a bit light in certain areas.

I also read the other CCNP Certification Guides and although they had some useful stuff for the CCIE Written like QoS and a few security topics the information presented in them can easily be found in other places. For their relevant CCNP exams they are still must read books. For the BSCI and BCMSN I also used the self study products from thebryantadvantage not the Trainsignal stuff just the study packages. I found the package for BSCI to be really good and it helped me a lot with BSCI. The package for BCMSN was not as good in my opinion but then the exam is also a bit random so I am sure it is pretty hard to come up with a training package for it.

I got a bit of a taste for QoS from the ONT exam and wanted to know more so I moved on to reading the Cisco QOS: Exam Certification Guide cover to cover. There are appendixes on the CD for people moving on to the CCIE that detail Frame Relay traffic shaping amongst other things. I absolutely loved this book and in my opinion this is required reading for the CCIE. The QoS exam was also very enjoyable by the way, it was second only to my recent CCNA exam in terms of being a good exam not full of stupid questions.

Then I decided to get a vendor neutral view on things and I read Interconnections: Bridges and Routers. I read the whole thing apart from one chapter, you can look on the Internetwork Expert website and find which chapter(s) they recommend you can skip. I did find this book really hard going in parts but I do feel that I gained a lot of of the book. I understand a lot more of the history of the protocols and have a much better grasp on how they really function. I even found out about the differences in the different bridging technologies which I did not know about before.

Next I moved on to TCP/IP Illustrated: Protocols v. 1 but I did not get too many chapters into it before I abandoned it for Internetworking with TCP/IP: v. 1. Internetworking is another great book in my opinion, and it reinforced a lot of things I already knew with a lot more understanding of how things work. I found this book a really easy read and loved every page.

Then it was on to Network Warrior which is a great little book. I read the whole thing except for some chapters on telephony that I plan to revisit soon. Unless you are a seriously experienced consultant then I would recommend this is a great book to pick up for everyone else. This is a real on the job book and it is a great read.

You would think I would be all booked out by now however the next one in the list was Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 Second Edition. This is on most people's must read list for the CCIE and I understand why. It was a great read and I read the whole thing except for the IS-IS chapter. I would say this is a must read book.

Internet Routing Architectures Second Edition was next on the bedtime stories list. The book is divided into two sections with the theory stuff covered in the first half and the configuration in the last half. I think I made a mistake in reading it straight through instead of reading the theory and then reading the corresponding configuration section. Still a really good book on BGP which helped me a lot.

Finally it was on to CCIE Routing and Switching Exam Certification Guide which I loved. I read everything except the two chapters on QoS. This book is an obvious must for the written exam and is great for reinforcing all the knowledge that you will have picked up from the other books.
So that was my reading list there were other books in there that deserve honorable mentions such as Routing TCP/IP Volume 2, Troubleshoot IP Routing Protocols, the two CCIE Practical Study Books and various other vendor neutral and Cisco Press books. I read a couple of RFC's as well (ouch) and various documents on the Cisco website.

As well as books I viewed a lot of CBT's (I would highly recommend CBT Nuggets for Professional Level Material, I did not have all of them for the CCNP as some were released after I had done the exams but the stuff I did have was excellent) and completed the whole of the first week of Internetork Expert's excellent Advanced Technologies class. I also completed all their Volume 1 labs on the various routing protocols.

For final exam prep on all my previous IT Exams I used Self Test Software which I have always found to be excellent. They are basically Transcender exams with a few less questions and for less money. I would highly recommended Self Test however they did not have a product for the CCIE.

So I turned to NetMasterClass and their excellent CCIE Written Practice Exam. I must say that this is an excellent product and is a must have for anyone wishing to pass the CCIE Written Exam. I would not have passed the written if it was not for this product.

So that is it all the products that I pretty much used to prepare for the written (Apologies if this looks like a marketing post I assure you I used the lot and bought them all out of my own money). Of two new products (IPExpert CoD and CCIE Command Memorizer) I have used since passing the written, I would say the CCIE Command Memorizer would be a great help to preparing for the written.

CCIE Shorts 22/09/08

2008-09-22T22:23:00.003+01:00

So I did manage to get my mothers ADSL working and it was relatively painless which was a bit of a surprise. I thought this being Africa things would not go smoothly but apart from the tree (which I need to cut back) that keeps knocking the phone line about the ADSL setup was nice and quick. The MWeb support staff I spoke to were excellent and setup was relatively quick. From my experience it looks like they lock down the wireless on the ADSL routers with WAP out of the box in South Africa which is a good thing. So I think they are one step ahead of the UK on that score. I seem to remember reading on the BBC that most of the ISP's in the UK ship their wireless routers out with WEP if any wireless security at all.

Anyhow I have been busy doing other things around the house sorting out her phone lines and fixing lights and all that stuff so I have been a busy boy.

While I have been busy Barooq passed his CCIE lab, this is pretty old news but if you are one of the few who has not seen this yet then why not head over to CCIE Candidate to congratulate him or better yet head over to his own blog Chronicles of a CCIE journey and congratulate him there as well. He has written a post on his lab experience that I found very interesting and he has promised to write another post on his advice for preparation that I am really looking forward to.

Also on the CCIE front thanks to Cisco Network Engineer for pointing out to me that the September edition of the CCIE Flyer had been released. There are some good articles in there and it is well worth the read so click here to check it out.

As for my studies well I am watching my way through the IPExpert BLS videos at the moment. Been learning a lot of new tips and tricks and reinforcing a lot of things I knew. However they are not short videos and with the note taking and lack of concentration they are taking quite a while to get through. Also I need to enjoy some African sunshine before I leave.

Study Update 19/09/08

2008-09-19T09:53:00.004+01:00

I have not been getting much study in since I passed my written last Friday as work has been a bit hectic and I am off to Africa for a few days so I needed to spend a bit of time with the family before I left.

I need to formulate a new approach in my study plans as I found studying for the written quite simple because there is a defined path in that you can just follow the information that is in the study guide with additional reading around topics. The lab is a different beast altogether as you just have the blueprint to follow. Although the temptation is to jump straight into the multi-protocol labs as soon as possible I am trying to avoid that path for the moment and focus on completing my mastery of the technologies individually. I did a lot of reading and basic labs for my CCIE written (which reminds me I will post on my written study materials soon) so I think the theory is pretty much there. It is just being able to recall all the commands and what exactly they do in a timely manner. So that is where despite me being an initial sceptic the CCIE Command Memorizer comes in. The little bit of study I have done has involved the CCIE Command Memorizer and hammering away at the BGP sections. I was uncertain where it would fit into my study plans especially as it does not emulate an IOS like Dyanmips, it is just an e-book where you type in commands. However I have found that when I have 10 minutes of free time I can just fire it up much quicker than Dynamips and just do a couple of sections and keep the commands in my mind. If you ever hear the Brians or Scott on any of the VoD (Video on Demand) or audio CD's they stress the importance of understanding the technology which is the most import thing in my opinion, but they also stress the value of repetition and that is where my study aide of the moment is helping quite nicely.

Anyhow I better get packing as flight is early this evening and I have to get down to the big smoke. Depending on the reliability of Telkom and whether they have setup my mothers ADSL line properly I might not be doing much posting for a week or so.

CCIE Command Memorizer

2008-09-16T06:50:00.005+01:00

Following my post about whether anyone had ever used the CCIE Command Memorizer, David Bomball CCIE 11023 and the owner of www.configureterminal.com as well as the Command Memorizer contacted me.

After a brief chain of emails he offered me the chance to review his product and blog on my experiences with it and where it helped/fitted in to my CCIE study. I accepted his kind offer as I have wanted to try the Command Memorizer since Richard first mentioned it on his blog. So no money has changed hands and we have agreed that I can say whatever I want about the product provided I give David the opportunity to respond before I post anything. I think this is fair enough as it gives a bit of balance to the review and will allow me to give the other side of the story as well.

Anyhow I have installed it on a virtual machine at home and my work laptop (you get two licences) and have ripped through the first BGP section already. So far I am impressed and I can already see a clear niche for it in my CCIE study plans. I will post a bit more on it once I have used it for a bit longer.

IP Expert Special Offer September

2008-09-16T06:37:00.003+01:00

I have been meaning to blog this for a while but I received the IPExpert newsletter the other day. (If you do not subscribe get yourself over to IPExpert and subscribe and then get yourself over to Internetwork Expert and subscribe to their newsletter oh and then www.confgiureterminal.com and subscribe to their newsletter as well. Hell there are loads of good newsletters out there so if you have anymore ideas add them in the comments section.) So where was I oh yes the IPExpert special offer apparently the Blended Learning Solution (BLS) is only staying at $999 till the end of September and then it goes up a massive amount. So if you are thinking of getting it I guess now is the time. Stick it on an interest free credit card like me and only worry about paying for it when the interest free period ends, except the interest free period ends a lot sooner than you would think and then ouch so maybe that was not such a good suggestion :-). The other special offer that they still have going on is the double rack time which I also intend going for (you have to have bought a BLS I think but may be able to negotiate). I will go for 10 sessions get them doubled to 20 and then hopefully Internetwork Expert will have a special so I can pick up some of their sessions as well. Anyhow enough of the marketing speak (just to let you know by the way I do not get paid or get free products from any of these companies) and back to some studying.

Official Written Pass!!! Well I think so at least

2008-09-13T18:10:00.003+01:00

Well it looks like I have been given the all clear and have passed the CCIE Written exam. Well I think so at least, as I have not really had any confirmation from anyone.

This morning I logged into the Peason Vue website they instruct you to log in to on your score report and it showed my results and showed pass, where as the night before it had said no results were available. It did not say "valid" which was what I was expecting it to say from reading the score report. However re-reading the report it does not specify the actual term used it just says that you exam results will be displayed. Anyhow a few hours later I recieved an email from Pearson Vue to thank me for testing with them, but no confirmation email that I had passed my exam like I am used to. So I was still a bit unsure if it was official. Then I logged into Cisco's website to see if I could schedule a lab and it said it could not find my details. Hmm so still not official and my mind was beginning to play tricks on me when would the confirmation come.

No confirmation email (if they even send one, I think they should by the way) ever came but I logged in to Cisco and now I can schedule my lab exam. I guess that is all the confirmation I need.

Hmm now when to book it for? This 90 day schedule thing while a good thing in terms of freeing up exam seats certainly makes you think before you commit :-). I notice that there are quite a few lab days open all the way until the end of the year in the test centre I will be using. So I guess it is working in freeing up slots. For me anything before next year will be throwing my money away. I was hoping to have my first shot at the lab I became really old :-) early next year, but I think I will have to wait. Christmas is nearly always a write-off and with a second child due early next year study time could be in short supply at the beginning of next year. So at the moment I am leaning towards a date at the end of April. I need firm dates to work to, but I will have to have a bit of a think over the next few days as well as a chat with the misses.

The Waiting Game

2008-09-12T19:22:00.003+01:00

I went to my local test centre and took my written exam today and I have a preliminary pass (yippee). However it is not an official pass as Cisco have implemented these new security measures that I mentioned in an earlier post. So when you are given your score sheet there are some instructions on it that tell you to logon to a Pearson Vue site, so that you can check your results. It can take up to 72 hours after you have taken the exam for your result to be confirmed. So it looks like I will be waiting for a while. I will post my experiences of the exam when I am confirmed as having passed. Quickly I will say that I thought it was a good test the questions were not as out there as some I encountered on the CCNP track and the English was okay. I only complained about the wording on one question and used the comment button to send my feedback on it to Cisco.

On the subject of exam security though I have always been in favour of the new measures Cisco is introducing but today I had pause to think. When I was talking to the examiners after the exam about the new security features Cisco has implemented. I realised that I had not had my photo taken and added to my score report. I asked them why this had not been done and they explained that it was only a requirement for test centres to take photos by the end of October.

However to implement the photo requirement they explained they would need to have a seperate room, buy an expensive camera and probably hire an extra member of staff to process the signing in of candidates. So since they were not getting any financial support from Pearson or Cisco then they had decided this was an expense they could not afford and they would be shutting down as a test centre. Which is very bad news for me as it means it would be very expensive to go do any certification exam as the nearest test centre would be over 26 miles away (one direction not far for you Yanks I know but the traffic here is murder and the price for fuel well do not get me started on that). I remember when my city used to have five or six test centres ah the good old days when I was but a wee lad :-) Over the last couple of years as I did my 2003 MCSE, renewed my CCNA and then did my CCNP I have seen them all close down. Now it looks like the final one which is already quite a trek for me to get to is closing down as well.

From most of the exam centre staff I have spoken to I understand that they do not make a great deal of money from being a test centre. Apparently most of the money goes either to Pearson or Cisco (Prometric and Microsoft or so on) . I am not sure of how exactly makes the money if someone can enlighten me that would be great. I mean someone must be making some money out of this stuff because the exams are not cheap. So it would be good if the big boys Cisco or Pearson (whoever makes the money from these exams) had a program for helping the small test centres fund the equipment they require to stay an exam centre. That way they could retain local test centres and allow more people access to their exams as well as allowing the additional benefit of a certain Ferret to take more exams :-)

That Might be Interesting - Route Processor and Switch Processor

2008-09-10T22:17:00.005+01:00

Okay the posts have been a bit slow due to work commitments and the last minute cramming for the written. Yes you did read that right I am a leave it till the last minute person (mental note to self really need to work on changing this habit) and am cramming for my written. I will let you know if it is a successful technique once I try the exam. At the moment chances of this approach succeeding are rated as very slim.

Anyhow I learnt something today that I thought was pretty interesting hey everyone else probably knew it anyway but I did n't and if there is one other poor soul out there like me that did not know this then this post might be worth while.

I have worked with plenty of Cat 6000, 6500 and even some old 5000 series switches where you can easily tell the difference between the switching part and the routing part of the switch. The routing part would be running IOS and the switching part CatOS. However on our new Cat 6500 with the sup720 installed it is not so easy, it looks like the whole switch is running IOS. So I was wondering if there still was separate switching and routing functions. Turns out there is see below:

When you connect you are in the routing part of the switch. How can you tell well the prompt looks like the one I have included in the capture below and when you run a show process cpu, you will notice the processor is not working that hard. Also a lot of the processes as you can see from the ones I have shown in the screen capture are running things you would expect to see at Layer3.

FERRETSW01#show process cpu
CPU utilization for five seconds: 1%/0%; one minute: 2%; five minutes: 3%
PID Runtime(ms) Invoked uSecs 5Sec 1Min 5Min TTY Process
1 0 254 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Chunk Manager
2 12 99006 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Load Meter
180 5636 16094 350 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 IP RIB Update
181 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 CHKPT DevTest
182 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 IP Traceroute
183 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Socket Timers
184 4984 30913376 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 HSRP (Standby)
185 4 3 1333 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 FR HA
186 900 1857583 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 TCP Timer
187 16 113 141 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 TCP Protocols
312 0 8253 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SPA ENTITY Proce
313 6024 999692 6 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 OSPF-5 Router
319 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 EEM ED CLI
320 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 EEM ED Counter
321 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 EM ED GOLD
322 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 EEM ED Interface
323 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 EEM ED IOSWD
324 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 EEM ED None
332 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Call Home proces
333 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 IP SLA Monitor M
341 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 CWAN OIR IPC Rea
342 0 99 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 IP SNMP
343 0 5 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 PDU DISPATCHER
344 12 5 2400 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SNMP ENGINE
345 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SNMP ConfCopyPro
346 860 654 1314 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SNMP Traps
347 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 T+ Admin
348 13504 583439 23 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 NTP
349 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Connection Mgr
350 23380 302763 77 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 BGP Router
351 238396 33207 7179 0.00% 0.03% 0.00% 0 BGP Scanner
352 18076 208907 86 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 OSPF-2 Hello
353 16928 213565 79 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 OSPF-5 Hello
361 364 1412 257 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 AAA Accounting
362 4 1803 2 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 TACACS+

Okay so now we know there is a Route Processor which we probably knew before, how do you get to the Switch Processor? Well you enter the command below which is the cool bit (I think it is cool most of you normal people who are reading this probably do not).

FERRETSW01#remote login switch
Trying Switch ...
Entering CONSOLE for Switch
Type "^C^C^C" to end this session

Now as you will see below the command prompt changes to have a -sp on the end to tell you, you are on the switch processor. Also notice the switch processor is doing a lot more work and take a look at some of the switch processes.

FERRETSW01-sp#show process cpu
CPU utilization for five seconds: 33%/5%; one minute: 28%; five minutes: 28%
PID Runtime(ms) Invoked uSecs 5Sec 1Min 5Min TTY Process
140 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 ADJ MGR
141 6968 90 77422 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 ADJ_MGR
142 8108 635096 12 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 L2 Control Task
143 456400 2177979 209 0.00% 0.03% 0.01% 0 L2 Throttle Task
144 7340 198375 37 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 L2 Aging Task
145 8309208 240162 34598 1.59% 1.58% 1.65% 0 Vlan Statistics
146 32208 1155105 27 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 L2 PI_E consiste
147 2564 277202 9 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 EARL7 monitor ta
148 3678252 17609 208884 0.00% 0.77% 0.73% 0 TYFIB Table Mana
149 40 9059 4 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 CFIB-BGP Task
150 1680 6684 251 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 CFIB LC QUEUE BO
151 7924 546055 14 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 CFIB LC TIMER Ta
152 220 49457 4 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 CFIB LC STATS Ta
153 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Gemini SP proces
177 576348 3213872 179 0.07% 0.07% 0.07% 0 Spanning Tree
178 293044 1487315 197 0.07% 0.06% 0.06% 0 UDLD
179 4 2 2000 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 capture process
180 0 17 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Const Rate Limit
181 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SP DHCP Snooping
182 0 97 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 802.1x switch
183 3228 38830 83 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 DTP Protocol
185 0 2 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Ethernet OAM Pro
186 26784 31724 844 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 L2 MAC oob sync
187 14052 420973 33 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 mls-hal Process
188 336 27742 12 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 mfib-const-lc Pr
189 28576 5462414 5 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 Mcast Hw Agent6
190 0 3 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 mls-msc-ha proce
191 64 390 164 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 mls-msc Process
192 0 1 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 mls-msc-cc Proce
193 0 13 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 PIM Snooping Pro
205 4 2 2000 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 CEF LC IPC Backg
206 35120 681339 51 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 CEF LC Stats
359 0 12 0 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 ADJ background
363 100884 4226254 23 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SCP async: LCP#5
364 530692 5393471 98 0.00% 0.07% 0.06% 0 DiagCard9/-1
365 48 83 578 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SpanTree Helper
366 20 86 232 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 1 Virtual Exec
367 436 637 684 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SpanTree Flush
368 44068 918131 47 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0 SCP async: LCP#9
369 45920 722416 63 0.00% 0.01% 0.00% 0 LACP Protocol

Okay while that was pretty interesting to me at least, what other things is this useful for? Well it turns out that if you have an ACE module installed in your switch when you do a show vlan. You will see the vlan that is connected to the ACE but you will not see any ports assigned to it. You have to go under the switch processor and do a show vlan there and then you will see the ports assigned to the vlan.

However those exciting screenshots will have to wait till the next installment of that might be interesting as I have a couple more minutes before bedtime and I am sure I have forgotten some of the IPv6 addresses ranges I crammed earlier :-)

Reality Bites

2008-09-06T23:00:00.003+01:00

I have been doing a lot of overtime at work for that last few weeks and so my CCIE written preparation has dropped off and so has my progress through the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 labs. I am not too worried about the Internetwork Expert Labs as I thought I could concentrate more on them when I pass my written. That is if I pass my written, as I do not feel like I will pass at the moment. I think I have seriously been underestimating the written exam as I thought ah no worries the CCIE written consists of the material from the entire CCNP rolled into one exam, should be no problem. However I have been doing some NetMaster Class written practice exams today and having my arse kicked. Some of it has been down to stupid mistakes but I cannot believe how much stuff that I have forgotten that I learnt for my CCNP. I mean a lot of it is probably useless facts but that is what Cisco tends to ask you in these exams. Anyhow I have till about Wednesday to see how I feel, and if things are still not going well then I will have to postpone the written again. It is highly annoying having to continually postpone, but hey I cannot afford to waste the exam fee.

Distractions

2008-09-02T00:13:00.004+01:00

As I sit here typing this after another long day at work (it is past midnight here) I am wondering about all the pulls on time people face in trying to achieve their goals and particularly the ones I am facing.

The are my usual ones work, family, Xbox/Wii (I have cut these out now) and all that stuff but then there are also other pulls or distractions (which I term as unwanted pulls on time, family = mostly wanted pull, Xbox = distraction).

I always want to learn new things and so I start to filter with different things, this distracts me from my original goals. There are so many other Cisco tracks Security and Voice to name a few that interest me and will pull me (or distract me) in another direction. In fact doing a lower level Cisco track in another subject like Security might actually help my career more than doing a CCIE in R&S at least at my current job. No wonder so few people who start out on the CCIE path actually finish it, it is probably not because they can't do it so much so as other things come along in the meantime (jeepers I should have been a rocket scientist for figuring this out on my own :-) ).

The reason I am thinking about this is because I may have the opportunity to take on some of the firewall stuff at work. I might be able to specialise in firewalls and make that become my thing, become the go to guy for firewalls and then use that as my opportunity to launch myself further up the corporate ladder. Or firewalls might be my distraction something that pulls me off in a different direction and leaves me in a no man's land half way between my original goal and some new place.

Thinking about this I should probably stick to the R&S track for now and distract myself as little as possible with the firewall side. I have spent enough money on R&S training materials and need to show some return on investment to my misses.

I will still have to look after Checkpoint and PIX firewalls at work. I can probably get by on the Checkpoint side with what I know already but I have no idea on PIX. I have been given two PIX firewalls and will need to be able to support them. So does anyone have any recommendations on good books about PIX that will be able to get me up and running pretty quickly without sucking up to much of my R&S study time? Also so I can better judge how far I should let this distract me, I understand PIX is end of life so would I be able to apply what I learn for PIX to the ASA stuff?

IP Expert Blended Learning Solution

2008-08-30T20:39:00.013+01:00

My IPExpert Blended Learning Solution arrived today, well that is not strictly true as it was delivered yesterday but I was at work so missed delivery. I phoned up to find out about re-delivery and found out that the warehouse was open for collections on Saturday, but only till 11am. So I rushed across town trying to beat traffic found the warehouse and got my parcel just before the warehouse closed phew.

I was surprised how light and small the parcel* was, as the previous parcel I have received from IPExpert was pretty huge but then again that was the old CoD and printed manuals. At first I thought I had been given the wrong parcel, however I checked my name on the front and the fact that it had an IPExpert logo on it so it was definitely mine.
When I got home I removed the FedEx envelope and discovered an IPExpert branded box inside. Inside the box was a little note saying that the drive had been checked before shipment. There was some instructions for the drive itself which appears to be a diskGO EDGE 2.5" inch portable drive. As I picked up the drive it felt really light and I must say a little bit cheap. It comes with a double USB lead and although you do not need to plug in both USB connections on my Mac or any of my PC's.
The disk has options to run both a PC and Mac version of the software. When you start the software you get a menu screen as shown below.

The workbooks are not included on the hard disk you have to access these from your online account. This information on the drive tells you this is to ensure that you always have the latest versions of the workbook. When you click on the Video on Demand option you are presented with the screen below. Then when you start a video you get Scott Morris in all his glory :-) as shown below.
Finally be assured that unlike the previous version of the IPExpert Video on Demand you get to see the CLI utilized as well.

I intend to post notes on the various videos and I will do a review of the BLS when I have had more of a chance to use it.

(*I decided against using the word package due to all the unwanted attention it would bring to my blog ;-) - warning you might not understand this if you do not live in the UK)

Great Post comparing IT Training and the Olympics

2008-08-28T22:42:00.003+01:00

Greg at Ethereal Mind has written a great post comparing IT Training and the Olympics. Get your manager to read it or if you are a manager then read it by clicking here.

Trainsignal is 6 Years Old!!

2008-08-28T21:33:00.002+01:00

Trainsignal in case you have never heard of them are an IT training company and it is their 6th birthday. They do not produce CCIE level training materials they work in a similar space to CBT Nuggets. That is they focus on Microsoft and Cisco Associate and Professional level training. They do make some great training products and as it is their 6th birthday they are doing a massive giveaway so click here to check them out.

Internetwork Expert FREE Technology V-Seminars and CCIE Interviews

2008-08-28T20:18:00.002+01:00

Thanks to cciepursuit for pointing this out to me but Internetwork Expert are now offering FREE Technology V-Seminars. The upcoming ones tend to be heavily focused on the Voice track but there is one on multicast coming up and several recorded ones that are to do with the Routing and Switching track. Anyhow click here to check them out.

While on the topic of Internetwork Expert Brandon Carroll's blog pointed me in the direction of this IE blog post on possible CCIE lab interviews. If it is true then I think it would be a pretty good idea although I am not sure what would happen if someone just passed the lab but did not pass the interview. What would their score report say? So what does everyone else think?

Comparing Configurations

2008-08-27T20:12:00.012+01:00

I was reading David Bombal's "Cool IOS Commands Networking Tips Newsletter*" the other day and in it he has a link to a video showing you how to use ExamDiff to compare configurations. I had never heard of ExamDiff before and so decided to compare it to the file comparison tool that I use. I must say that ExamDiff is a very nice little tool. It has a lot of sophisticated functions and in my opinion it displays the differences in configurations nice and clearly, which is a must when you are scrolling through hundreds of lines of configuration at 3 in the morning and your eyes are stinging like hell. My only problem with it is that you need to upgrade to ExamDiff Pro at a cost to be able to compare directories.

Comparing directories of configuration files is a feature that is very important to me. I use this feature to download all the configuration files I am working on before a change and then download them after a change and compare directories to see the differences. So for the moment I will keep using Microsoft's WinDiff which allows me to compare directories and is still free. On the downside it has a lot more of a basic feel to it compared to ExamDiff (see below). Does anyone else have any configuration comparing utilities that they can recommend?

* If you have not subscribed to the newsletter then head over to http://www.configureterminal.com/ and subscribe. David Bombal is also the guy who produces the CCIE command memorizer and I was thinking of getting it. I have seen a couple of blogs asking people for their opinions on it, so I will join the club has anyone else used this tool and if so what did they think?

Written Moved

2008-08-27T09:09:00.003+01:00

The last few weeks have been pretty brutal with work and family commitments. I did a change last night that went on for 7 hours and have had 3 hours sleep so far. This has ment I have slipped a bit in my CCIE written preparation and so have moved the exam till the middle of September. I should have a couple of weeks coming up where I can put in a lot more study time and get myself to a level that I feel will enable me to pass the written.

Study Update 25/08/08

2008-08-25T22:23:00.003+01:00

Studying this weekend has been non-existent due to helping out with some family issues. I managed to finish the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 BGP labs before the weekend which was good practice. I will go over some of the last labs again as I need to drum things like advertise-maps and as-sets into my head. I also have one more chapter in Internet Routing Architectures to read and will publish a review on the book when I have finished.

I have also decided to upgrade my IPExpert workbooks to the Blended Learning Solution as I will be going away in a few weeks and will probably not have Internet access. So I will not have access to my Internetwork Expert CoD as I only have the online version and not the DVD version. Also my IE CoD was playing up this morning as I could not get the CLI on the first IPv6 video to display. Since I had a couple of excuses to upgrade and decided to go for it. I will write up a review when the BLS arrives and have got round to using it.

Mike Down Leaves IPExpert

2008-08-21T23:13:00.004+01:00

Mike Down for those of you who know who he is has left IPExpert. For those of you that do not know Mike was not a famous triple CCIE trainer, he was just what IPExpert call a Training Advisor. So someone who helps you choose what CCIE products you will buy from IPExpert. However Mike had a higher profile than other people in a similar postition as he launched his own blog which I have listed at the bottom of my page he also started contacting candidates about placing IPExpert logos on their blogs as well as doing a lot of other promotional work.

So Mike is the reason for the glut of blogs out there with IPExpert logo's on them. Hey he is even the reason that this site has an IPExpert logo on it even though I did not recieve any benefit for it. I enjoyed communicating with Mike and so I decided to place a banner on this site for IPExpert. The reasons Mike left are obviously confidential but there is a post on his blog thanking him. So I would like to say my own thanks and good luck Mike whatever you decide to do.

IPExpert did seem to need a bit of a pick up after Scott Morris left and Mike did seem to raise their profile in the CCIE community after Scott left. So lets hope that IPExpert can do it again and that neither of these events will prove to much of a distraction to them providing top quality CCIE training materials. We need competition in the CCIE training community as it helps improve the quality of the products and keep the prices down.

Finally does anyone have an opinion on the IPExpert Blended Learning Solution? I am thinking of purchasing it to get a different perspective to Internetwork Expert. I am mainly interested in people's opinion's on the CoD as I already have the first two workbooks. I have the Internetwork Expert Advanced Technologies CoD and their first two workbooks so maybe this is enough. Anyhow any opinions would be appreciated.

New Blogs

2008-08-21T20:08:00.002+01:00

While browsing the web the other day I found a new technical blog that I had not seen before so I have added it to my blog list. It compares favorably with my favorite technical blogs Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks and Packetlife. So click here to check it out. I have also just found The Packet University site which also looks really good.

CCIE Wireless Beta Exam

2008-08-20T23:17:00.000+01:00

I have just received the email below from Cisco. So for those of you who are interested in Wireless here is a new track to pursue. One track is enough for me so I will not be taking Cisco up on their kind offer :-)

GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT:

Cisco is now soliciting beta candidates for Cisco's upcoming CCIE Wireless Written Exam. We are looking for an exclusive set of professional and expert level Wireless Networking Engineers who can dedicate 3 hours of their time to take the beta exam.

The CCIE Wireless certification, to be launched later this year, will validate that professionals have the expertise to design, manage and support mission and business critical wireless networks and the job skills and technical knowledge required of expert level network IT practitioners. This written exam is the first step in obtaining the CCIE Wireless certification. Successful candidates will have mastered broad theoretical knowledge of wireless networking and demonstrated a readiness for the CCIE Wireless lab examination. Be one of the first wireless professionals to get a peek at the new CCIE Wireless exam.

Location: Pearson Vue Testing Centers, Worldwide
Registration Date: October 7
Last Test Date: November 14, 2008
Cost: $US50
Exam Number/Name: 351-050 CCIE Wireless Beta Written Exam

To learn more about the exam blueprint, job skills and reference material, please go to http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/ccie/wireless/index.html

CCIE Shorts 19/08/08

2008-08-19T23:27:00.006+01:00

Just seen a post at cciepursuit about Graded Labs introducing Workbook Scaffolding. I think I may have an email somewhere in the depths of my inbox about it. However cciepursuit does a pretty good job of explaining what it is so rather than re-inventing the wheel head over to his blog by clicking here to read more. It does look an awesome feature and it certainly will make rack rentals more attractive well it will for me. I plan to book some Internetwork Expert rack time in the coming months so when I do I will let you know how I get on.

Also I see Ted Romer passed his R&S CCIE so head on over to his blog by clicking here to congratulate him.

Colin McNamara posted an excellent presentation entitled "who moved my brain" so click here to go read it.

Greg at etherealmind posted about his blogging ethics and is looking for some feedback on them so give him some feedback by clicking here. I do not have any ethics so not really a post I could make :-) in fact my none of my posts could never compare to Greg's. In my opinion he writes some of the best opinion pieces on the web so if you have never been to his site I would really check it out.

Finally Networkers is being held in Johannesburg this year and Deon of Network Ninja has already booked his place. I would love to go to Networkers but I have never worked at a company who would pay for me to go. As it is in Johannesburg I would even be prepared to pay for the plane ticket as I could tie it in with a holiday to visit family. Hmm maybe I will have to try my luck at work and see how I get on.

Study Update 18/08/08

2008-08-18T23:30:00.003+01:00

I had a really busy weekend with a change we were doing on the network. I got to work through Saturday night which was fun not :-) Anyhow studying has picked up a bit as I am making my way through Internet Routing Architectures. I have also been making good progress through the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 BGP labs. I am finally approaching the end of the labs which is good news as it has taken me quite a while. I have been going through them quite thoroughly and have learnt quite a few new things that I did not know about like BGP Outbound Route Filtering (ORF). My general approach at the moment is to read and work on the CLI at the same time. I find that this helps me remember the stuff I have read about, well to an extent anyhow.

Learning Perl

2008-08-15T21:26:00.004+01:00

Okay so you might think what the hell has learning Perl got to do with my CCIE. Although it might be a bit of a distraction from my CCIE studies I believe that learning Perl will help my networking career. The senior engineer where I work now uses Perl to go out to all of our routers and automatically back them up. There are tools like CatTools and so on that already do this for you but he also uses it to interogate configs make changes and generally make managing the whole infrastructure a whole lot easier. So I think that Perl will really help me in my career, now the only problem is how to go about learning it. I am not really a programer at heart and I think that a book will be the best way for me to go about learning Perl. The book I am leaning towards is Learning Perl 5th Edition by O'Reilly so if anyone has any experience of this book or any others that would help me learn Perl, then please let me know.

The Pesky Frame-Relay Interface DLCI Command

2008-08-14T23:07:00.004+01:00

I just read an excellent post by Scott Morris of Internetwork Expert on the frame-relay interface-dlci command. Most of it was just reinforcing what I already knew but what I did not know about was the sub-command under the frame-relay interface-dlci command. I mean check it out below more options then I knew about. To read Scott's excellent post click here. Meanwhile I need to go research all these commands.

Rack1R2(config-if)#frame-relay interface-dlci 205
Rack1R2(config-fr-dlci)#?
Frame Relay dlci configuration commands:
auto Configure Automation
class Assign a mapclass to a dlci
default Set a command to its defaults
exit Exit from FR dlci configuration mode
load-interval Specify interval for load calculation for a dlci
no Negate a command or set its defaults
vofr Voice over Frame-Relay
x25-profile Assign an X.25 profile to a dlci (Annex G Service)

TCP Timeout on IOS

2008-08-14T22:46:00.003+01:00

Greg at Etherealmind has done an interesting post on the TCP Timeout command in IOS. I had read about it before many moons ago but it is one of those commands that I tend to forget about. Anyhow Greg's article is a good reminder so click here to read it.

Study Update 13/08/08

2008-08-13T23:53:00.003+01:00

Have not had much of a chance to get any studying done today as work is exceptionally busy at the moment as I am preparing for a big network change this weekend. It looks like it is going to be an all weekend job, including working through Saturday night. The misses will not be best pleased as I will probably not be much use as I will be completely worn out when we finish. In fact the studying will not be best pleased either, although on a positive note the bank balance should improve once the over time payment makes it's way into my account. I feel a bit more positive today after reading through the struggles of a few other people on their blogs and I did get a chance to do a NetMasterClass practice exam which I got 73% on. I am okay with that score for the moment as I still have a few things I need to brush up on and I made quite a few silly mistakes. Anyhow lets hope I can survive the weekend and find some more time to type up my notes and get on with my studies.

The path ahead looks very long and hard indeed

2008-08-12T23:10:00.002+01:00

Today has been a pretty hectic day and a soul destroying one in that. The path to my CCIE is looking very long and hard at the moment. Stuff that should be bread and butter for a CCIE is just not going into my head. The time I need to study just is not there, what with family commitments and work getting very busy again. At moments like this I do feel like giving up and I have only just started the journey. I remember reading a stat some where that only something like 3%* of the people who start out on the CCIE journey actually finish it. I have felt like this before when I was first doing my CCNA and I could not figure out the CiscoPress book or when I was doing my CCNP when I felt it each time I started studying for a new exam. My strategy for coping is to remind myself that I have felt like this before and it does eventually get easier and things fall into place. However at the moment this mind trick is not working. The stuff I read is just not sticking, stuff I learnt I have forgotten and now have to re-learn. Then just to top off my depression you meet people who passed their CCIE's a long time ago and have actually gone inactive because they do not rate the CCIE anymore. They can knock up scripts that can get a router to do anything you could ever want and produce project plans and documentation that is simply out of this world. I get stressed that I will never be as good as them and that my dream of one day working for myself will remain just that a dream. However I must pick myself up and get back on the horse tomorrow is a new day and I cannot afford to waste all that money I have sunk into training products.

* For some reason 3% sticks in my head but I could be wrong if anyone knows the correct stat please let me know.

Study Update 12/08/08

2008-08-12T00:07:00.003+01:00

Study has been moving along but slowly and if I am going to do my written at the end of August then I need to get a real move on. I have quite a few chapters in the Certification Guide still to read and I need to spend a lot of time on the Boson exam questions you get with the book and the NetMasterClass practice exam I bought. So still a long way to go although at this stage even though the next couple of weekends are a washout with work and helping family. I will probably move the date but I do need deadlines to speed myself up. In terms of lab time I am still working on the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 BGP labs. I have been having a bit of a nightmare getting a few things into my head by repeating them but soon I should be pretty solid on most of the basic BGP commands. It will take a lot of work to get me to the level where I can do multiprotocol labs and spot the issues before I crash into them, but I intend to try and build a very solid base and then move slowly up to the more challenging labs. Anyhow time for bed and provided I do not have to waste to much of my day tomorrow messing arround with GBIC's and fibre leads then hopefully I will be able to get some more studying done tomorrow night.

New Blogs for CCIE's

2008-08-11T22:45:00.001+01:00

Just seen Mike Down's post that Jared Scrivener the IPExpert instructor passed his third CCIE so congratulations to him. Dam I wish I could just pass one :-( He still has some catching up to do though if he wants to catch Brian Dennis of InternetworkExpert. Anyhow as well as passing his third CCIE he has also setup a blog, so go take a look by clicking here. I am sure there will be a lot of useful info on there very soon.

Also Mike posted about Emmanual Conde the CCIE recruitment agent who has setup a site the CCIEFLYER. It looks to have a lot of interesting articles which I will probably read in my lunch break tomorrow. That is if I am not running around a huge comms room trying to look for an LX GBIC which we will probably not have in stock. Anyhow I digress so check out Emmanual's site here.

ip bgp-community new-format

2008-08-07T23:19:00.003+01:00

Hmm today I discovered another command I did not really know about and probably should have. The ip bgp-community new-format command. After looking it up on the Cisco website I found the following:

To display BGP communities in the format AA:NN (AS-community number/2-byte number), use the ip bgp-community new-format command in global configuration mode.To re-enable the previous display format for BGP communities (NN:AA), use the no form of this command.

ip bgp-community new-format

no ip bgp-community new-format

Usage Guidelines

RFC 1997, BGP Communities Attribute specifies that a BGP community is made up of two parts that are 2 bytes long. The first part is the autonomous system number and the second part is a 2-byte number. In the most recent version of the RFC, a community is of the form AA:NN. The Cisco default community format is one 32-bit number. The ip bgp-community new-format command changes the community format to AA:NN to conform to RFC 1997.

Examples

The following example upgrades a router that uses the 32-bit number community format to the AA:NN format:

Router(config)# ip bgp-community new-format

The following example shows how BGP community numbers are displayed when the ip bgp-community new-format command is enabled:

Router# show ip bgp 10.0.0.0

BGP routing table entry for 10.0.0.0/8, version 4

Paths: (2 available, best #2, table Default-IP-Routing-Table)

  Advertised to non peer-group peers:

  10.0.33.35

    10.0.33.35 from 10.0.33.35 (192.168.3.3)

      Origin incomplete, metric 10, localpref 100, valid, external

      Community: 1:1

  Local

    0.0.0.0 from 0.0.0.0 (10.0.33.34)

      Origin incomplete, metric 0, localpref 100, weight 32768, valid, sourced, best

Written Booked!!! Well for now at least

2008-08-07T23:01:00.003+01:00

Well I have just parted with a huge £160 of my hard earned cash and booked the CCIE R&S Written exam for the end of the month. I think I am being a tad bit unrealistic as I still have a lot of reading and practice exams to do and several busy weekends coming up. Anyhow I need a bit of a deadline even an unrealistic one just to get me moving in the right direction. I will probably move the exam but hopefully not by to much as I really need to get this one out of the way and focus my efforts on the main event.

Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture

2008-08-07T22:54:00.002+01:00

When I was browsing the Ciscopress website I saw that Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture was under just released books. The published date was July 18th but it is still listed as the first edition. So I guess they are doing another publishing run and have not updated the book. Is this book still relevant as I am thinking of getting it? Thinking about it if it is being re-published then I guess there must be demand for it. So anyone who owns this book please let me know if it is worth buying.

Study Update 06/08/08

2008-08-06T23:20:00.003+01:00

Work has calmed down a bit over the last two days so I have been able to get a bit more reading done. I am up to the configuration examples in Internet Routing Architectures and I actually think I made a mistake in just reading the book straight through. Even though the book refers you to the configuration examples when explaining the theory. I read the theory part straight through and have now arrived at the configuration examples. Anyhow at least I am making a little progress on the reading front although I will have to get a move on to finish reading the Certification Guide and Internet Routing Architectures by the end of this month. I also really need to learn how to do some proper notes and not rely on my memory as I have been doing up until this point.

On the lab front I am still working very slowly through the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 BGP labs and although they are quite simple I got stuck on one last night. I forced myself not to look at the answer when I thought I had configured everything right and struggled through trying to diagnose the fault myself. Although it took me a while to solve and I discovered that it was a typo after all, I did get some positives out of it. I got a chance to work on my trouble shooting skills.

I have to babysit some changes that are being made on our network tomorrow night and I have a hectic weekend with family coming up so there will probably not be much progress for the rest of this week. Any chance I do get I plan on trying to turn my BGP scribbles into some sort of proper notes.

Service Internal

2008-08-06T22:09:00.003+01:00

I took the advice of Stretch from PacketLife and decided to research the various lines of our firm's routers configurations. So what happens first command I research I find it pretty hard to find out what it does. The command I was researching was service internal. After some searching round the web I found that it if you apply it in global configuration mode it causes some previously hidden commands to show up.

If anyone else has any knowledge on this command then please let me know.

Exam Security

2008-08-05T22:10:00.002+01:00

I was browsing the blog on Cisco's Learning Network site and came across several interesting posts on exam security. To summarise the things I thought were important or interesting are as below:
1. No cheat sheets are going to get you through the technical interview at a new job. In fact I used to be a lot harsher on people who had certifications than those who did not when I was involved in doing a technical interviews. My reasoning was that the people with certifications were claiming a level of knowledge and so I wanted to see if they had cheated their way to that level of knowledge. However I obviously was not that harsh as some of the interviewers mentioned in the blog post as made some job candidates cry in an interview, ouch you know you are out of your depth when you get so flustered you start crying.
2. There is a lawsuit to do with the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). Never heard of it myself but the important thing about the suit is that the publisher of the GMAT tests have shut down a website that sold GMAT questions and answers. However that is not the really juicy bit the juicy bit is that the publisher was given control of the offending websites domain, and they gained possession of the hard drive containing payment information of anyone who bought cheat sheets from the site. So now they might cancel people's GMAT scores and ban them from future GMAT tests. Cisco is apparently watching the case with interest.
3. Getting someone else to take your test is not as much of a minority sport as I thought it was in fact it seems to be quite a popular way of passing the exams in some parts of the world. Never worked for me though I have problems finding anyone ugly enough to impersonate me :-)
4. People will cheat at everything I mean who would have thought that people would use an automated script to book their CCIE lab seats. This is against Cisco rules for those of you who do not know. I could not quite believe this one myself I mean you have got so far why risk getting your self in trouble with Cisco just to book a lab seat.
5. Testking the biggest brain dump vendor grosses an estimated $10 million dollars annually. So now wonder they keep doing what they do, it is big business, in fact it is scary how big a business cheating is. I mean $10 million annually, means that a hell of a lot of people are cheating.

The good news is that it appears that Cisco are finally taking all this stuff seriously and implementing security measures that I believe will make a real difference to improving exam security. You can read more about this on the Cisco Learning Network site blog.

Proctor Labs Deal

2008-08-04T21:39:00.002+01:00

I just saw Mike's post on Twitter and then headed over to his blog where he is offering to match whatever number of rack rental slots you buy from Proctor Labs. So if you buy 10 sessions he will give you 10 free and if you buy 20 you get 20 free. So if you are in need of some rack time then I would head over to Mike's blog and check out his offer.

Study Update 01/08/08

2008-08-01T22:42:00.002+01:00

Well once again this has been a bit of a washout for me in terms of studying. Work has been pretty hectic, with quite a few hours of overtime and to top it all off my son has decided that he will stop sleeping through the night, so I am pretty tired at the moment. I am still struggling my way through Internet Routing Architectures whenever I get a spare minute to try and improve my understanding of BGP. I also had a read of RFC1998 which was very interesting for a RFC and is what our designers are planning on implementing at work. I have not had much chance to continue with the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 BGP labs but hopefully I can do at least two some time this weekend. Hmm I need less things to do in my life, family and CCIE's do not mix well :-)

San Fran Network Admin Saga Not Quite Over

2008-08-01T22:29:00.003+01:00

I thought the San Fran network saga was all over. Well it appears I was wrong and stupidity is indeed endless. Click here to head over to cciepursuit to read about the latest chapter.

IE removes Locklizard

2008-07-31T20:06:00.003+01:00

I have just seen that Internetwork Expert have decided to remove the Locklizard PDF protection system from their products. This is due to their legitimate customers having problems accessing their products. I had a few problems accessing my products at first which was a bit frustrating but once they were sorted out then it has been smooth sailing. However from a Mac and Linux point of view then this is great news because Locklizard only works on Windows. I must say this is a brave move from IE and I hope the community rewards them by buying legitimate copies of their training material. I mean going for the CCIE in the first place is not cheap and I understand that if you speak to any of the training companies and can convince them that you really are hard up they might do you a deal. Also I have seen plenty of giveaways or scholarship programs from virtually all the major vendors. So lets hope this show of faith in their customers by IE does not hurt them to badly. Anyhow for the full post head here.

Tracking down a server

2008-07-30T23:12:00.006+01:00

So now I have moved to a much larger network and only have access to the network and not to any servers I face a whole host of new hurdles that I have to overcome. One of those hurdles is trying to locate which switch a server sits on. So far I have developed the method below however there are some areas I need some advice especially on the CatOS stuff.

I needed to track down the server Nike. So first idea was to trace route to the server. So on to my trusty Windows laptop and enter the trace command doh this is not a Cisco box. Anyhow I remembered the Windows command as below:

C:\Program Files\Support Tools>tracert nike

Tracing route to nike.ciscoferret.local[10.109.36.85]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms vl101-ESP-MAD-009-SW102-WEST1 [10.106.31.1]
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms ge1/1-ESP-MAD-009-SW110-CORE [10.106.34.133]
3 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms fe2/0-ESP-MAD-009-RTR01 [10.106.34.146]
4 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms vl100-ESP-MAD-010-sw01-w1-msfc [10.107.50.142]

5 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms vl952-ESP-MAD-010-sw02-core [10.109.56.17]
6 7 ms 1 ms 1 ms vl963-ESP-MAD-010-sw04-core [10.109.56.77]
7 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms nike.ciscoferret.local[10.109.36.85]

Trace complete.

So now I had my trace file and more importantly I had the IP address of the last Layer 3 device before my server. So next thing is to telnet to the last Layer 3 device before my server.

C:\Program Files\Support Tools>telnet 10.109.56.77

Then I ran a show arp to include the IP address of the server as below:

ESP-MAD-010-SW04-CORE#show arp | in 10.109.36.85
Internet 10.109.36.85 5 0011.54dd.3382 ARPA Vlan510

Now I had the MAC address it was time to find out what interface it had been learnt on.

ESP-MAD-010-SW04-CORE#show mac-address-table add 0011.254a.2833
Legend: * - primary entry
age - seconds since last seen
n/a - not available

vlan mac address type learn age ports
------+----------------+--------+-----+----------+--------------------------
Supervisor:
* 510 0011.54dd.3382 dynamic Yes 0 Gi6/1
Supervisor:
* 510 0011.54dd.3382 dynamic Yes 0 Gi6/1

So I knew the interface the next thing was to figure out who was connected to that interface. So this is where trusty CDP comes in handy (that is if you are running it, not sure what I would do if it was not enabled, anyone got any bright ideas?)

ESP-MAD-010-SW04-CORE#show cdp neighbors gigabitEthernet 6/1 detail
-------------------------
Device ID: TBP06360198(ESP-MAD-010-SW02-NSR)
Entry address(es):
IP address: 10.109.56.44
Platform: WS-C6509, Capabilities: Trans-Bridge Switch IGMP
Interface: GigabitEthernet6/1, Port ID (outgoing port): 3/6
Holdtime : 169 sec

Version :
WS-C6509 Software, Version McpSW: 7.3(1) NmpSW: 7.3(1)
Copyright (c) 1995-2002 by Cisco Systems

advertisement version: 2
VTP Management Domain: 'ACB_Module_9'
Native VLAN: 954
Duplex: full

ESP-MAD-010-SW04-CORE#

Now I had my neighbor time to telnet to my neighbor and carry on the task of ferreting out which switch the server was located on.

ESP-MAD-010-SW04-CORE#telnet 10.109.56.44
Trying 10.109.56.44 ... Open

Whoops this switch was running CatOS and this is where things got difficult for me. My CatOS is not that good so the best method I could come up with is as follows. If anyone has a better way which I am sure they do please let me know.

I did a show on the VLAN which I had learnt above from the show mac-address-table add 0011.254a.2833 command.

ESP-MAD-010-SW01-NSR (enable) show cam dynamic 510
* = Static Entry. + = Permanent Entry. # = System Entry. R = Router Entry.
X = Port Security Entry $ = Dot1x Security Entry

VLAN Dest MAC/Route Des [CoS] Destination Ports or VCs / [Protocol Type]
---- ------------------ ----- -------------------------------------------
510 00-60-56-ae-49-3f 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-7b-18-26 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-9e-44-82 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-9d-57-47 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-12-79-9e-38-2f 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-75-46 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-48-a6 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-29-6b-ca-9b-50 7/26 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-7b-18-27 4/31 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-82-3c-25 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-4e-6f-18 6/28 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-22-a9 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-bd-5f-d1 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-4a-17-c8 6/39-40 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-9d-50-bd 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-36-6b-58 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-6d-18 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-bd-5f-d0 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-4a-17-c9 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-9d-16-fd 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-36-6b-59 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-29-6b-f5-79-c3 7/39-40 [ALL]
Do you wish to continue y/n [n]? y
510 00-60-56-ae-5b-5e 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-ec-ed-3c 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-9e-00-1f 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-7b-89-f6 5/19 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-6c-1f 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-9c-2d-7a 8/19 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-21-07 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-9d-57-db 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-1b-54-bb-d3-b6 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-7e-2d 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-9d-56-8d 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-9e-76-47 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-9e-3a-0b 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-3d-9e 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-bc-a7-67 3/5 [ALL]
510 40-00-40-10-10-12 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-9d-51-7b 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-9d-55-f7 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-9c-2d-ba 8/19 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-2f-af 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-1d-37 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-4e-66-d6 6/28 [ALL]
Do you wish to continue y/n [n]? y
510 00-0d-60-4e-6a-f8 6/28 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-82-7c-91 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-bd-1c-de 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-54-dd-33-82 6/39-40 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-36-6a-be 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-73-5b 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-9c-27-b2 8/19 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-42-b7 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-14-5e-bd-1c-df 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-4e-6f-ea 6/28 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-59-54 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-11-25-9d-56-69 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-1a-64-63-8d-2c 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-88-c6-87-14 6/29 [ALL]
510 00-0d-88-c6-8b-90 8/19 [ALL]
510 00-12-79-9e-64-82 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-4e-6a-74 6/28 [ALL]
510 00-0d-60-4e-6e-f8 6/28 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-9e-52-47 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-10-18-06-05-04 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-4f-62 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-29-6b-16-45-25 7/47-48 [ALL]
Do you wish to continue y/n [n]? y
510 00-12-79-9e-64-83 4/48 [ALL]
510 00-29-6b-f5-ea-5b 6/25 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-09-43 3/5 [ALL]
510 00-60-56-ae-49-03 3/5 [ALL]

I took the output I received above and pasted it in to wordpad. Then I did a find on the MAC address but first I had to do a conversion from the dotted decimal MAC address notation of IOS to the dashes of CatOS. So I actually did a find on 00-11-54-dd-33-82. From this I found MAC address 00-11-54-dd-33-82 was being learnt on interface 6/39. So a show cdp neighbors 6/39 detail as below showed me what switch was connected to this interface.

ESP-MAD-010-SW01-NSR (enable) show cdp neighbors 6/39 detail
Port (Our Port): 6/39
Device-ID: BLC005MAD-BCSM1
Device Addresses:
IP Address: 10.199.130.29
Holdtime: 127 sec
Capabilities: SWITCH IGMP
Version:
Cisco Internetwork Operating System Software
IOS (tm) CIGESM Software (CIGESM-I6Q4L2-M), Version 12.1(14)AY4, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Copyright (c) 1986-2004 by cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Mon 20-Dec-04 10:20 by myl
Platform: cisco OS-CIGESM-18
Port-ID (Port on Neighbors's Device): GigabitEthernet0/17
VTP Management Domain: unknown
Native VLAN: 508
Duplex: full
System Name: unknown
System Object ID: unknown
Management Addresses: unknown
Physical Location: unknown
ESP-MAD-010-SW01-NSR (enable)

The switch connected to interface 6/39 was a blade centre so I telneted to the IP address I learnt from the show cdp neighbors 6/39 detail command above. Then I did a show mac-ad address 0011.254a.2832 and it showed me the blade port the server was connected to.

BLC005MAD-BCSM1#show mac-ad address 0011.254a.2832
Mac Address Table
-------------------------------------------

Vlan Mac Address Type Ports
---- ----------- -------- -----
510 0011.254a.2832 DYNAMIC Gi0/8
Total Mac Addresses for this criterion: 1
BLC005MAD-BCSM1#

Now as I said I am sure this is not the easiest or most efficient way to track down a server. So as this skill is really important to me in my current job if anyone has a better way then please let me know. Any help would be most appreciated.

Pesky VRF's

2008-07-28T20:54:00.003+01:00

VRF's (Virtual Routing and Forwarding for the uninitiated) are mentioned quite briefly in the CCNP ISCW exam cert guide. So they are a virtual router yada yada seems quite simple. However I had never seen them in an actual CLI. So imagine my surprise when I said oh such and such route does not exist in the routing table and my colleague turns around and says yes it does. So I do show ip route 10.10.10.10 and no route shows up and then I do show ip route and it still does not show up. Well I cannot see it and then my colleague says did you check the VRF. Ohps the VRF so I do show ip route vrf abc 10.10.10.10 and there it is as clear as day the route I have been looking for. Doh mental note to self remember about VRF's however I still occasionally forget but I am getting better.

So I think I have the hang of these pesky VRF things and then I need to telnet to a particular switch. Hmm cannot get onto it hmm what's going on here I wonder. I pluck up the courage to ask colleague another stupid question "erm mate I cannot access core switch 1, is there an ACL on there that is blocking me?". Reply comes back that all should be fine, so what is going on here. Once again it turns out to be the pesky little VRF stuff that has got me stumped. I need to telnet 11.1.1.2 /vrf abc ah that works.

Then a few days later I want to do a show ip bgp hmm output not as expected. Right this time I twig it has to be one of those pesky VRF's getting in my way. So let's try doing show ip vrf abc wooh no bgp command. Okay lets try figure this out show ip ? and look through the options hmm nothing there so how about a show ip bgp ? hmm nothing there either. Argh so I am stumped how the heck do you do a show ip bgp when you have VRF's around? Time to prepare colleague for another stupid question by offering to make him a drink. Once drink has been made then I utilize my chance for another stupid question. "Umm so you know these VRF's how do you do a show ip bgp turns out the answer is to do a show ip bgp vpnv4 vrf abc. So I have enough trouble with VRF's and then they go add the vpnv4 command before the vrf command. Guess I will get to that bit when I sort out multi-protocol BGP. Anyhow you will be pleased to know that I am getting on a lot better with VRF's now. However as with anything on this blog if any of you have any tips, hints or advice please feel free to post it. I have plenty to learn so welcome any teaching :-)

Are Dynamips Days Numbered?

2008-07-25T20:19:00.001+01:00

Are Dynamip's days numbered or will it be here for a long time yet? The reason this question popped into my head is reading on the superb IOS Hints and Tricks blog that the new IOS only supports one of the Dynamips platforms namely the 7200. Read the post here. That would be bad enough on it's own but then I read on the Network Ninja blog and Joe Harris's blog that Cisco is slowly planning to roll out it's software activation and licensing feature. So what does this all mean for Dynamips, are it's days numbered or will someone come up with a way to get round these obstacles? Not sure what will happen but I do think that it is definitely in Cisco's interest to allow people to access it's software for learning purposes. The more engineers that are trained in Cisco technologies the more potential customers Cisco will have. I have also seen rumors that Cisco has it's own emulation software that internal staff can use, so if they do and they kill Dynamips maybe they can release it to the community. If Richard or Joe or someone else who works for Cisco can confirm if they do have their own internal emulation software that would be most helpful :-)

Cisco Exam Security

2008-07-24T21:29:00.000+01:00

I have just received the email pasted below. Basically it lays out Cisco's new exam security procedures and the most important point of the whole thing in my opinion is that your result is not final until 72 hours after you have done your exam. In this time Cisco (or probably a company they have outsourced it to) run forensics software against your exam to try and determine if they think you have legitimately passed the exam or used some sort of cheating method. Anyhow at least they are trying to do something about exam security and it looks like the measures they announced some time ago have finally been implemented.

Cisco and Pearson VUE Launch Global Test Delivery Exam Security Enhancements

Cisco and its global testing provider, Pearson VUE, a business of Pearson Inc. are pleased to announce a series of security enhancements that will reinforce the integrity and value of its Career certification program.

The advanced security enhancements include the use of digital photographs for candidate-identity verification and forensic analysis of testing data. The new measures, to be implemented beginning on Aug. 1, will include:

Photo on Score Report and Web – On completion of a certification exam at the test center, candidates will receive preliminary score reports imprinted with their photos and unique authentication codes. The authentication code can be used to access a candidate’s official score online at Pearson VUE’s website usually within 72 hours of the examination. The online score report will also display the candidate’s photo. Candidates may share access to their online records with employers or other third parties.
Forensic Analysis – Exam results and other testing data will be continuously analyzed by forensic software to detect aberrant testing behavior and to flag suspect exams for further investigation.
Preliminary Score Report – All paper score reports will be preliminary, pending the results of forensic analysis, until official exam scores are posted to the Web usually within 72 hours of exam completion. Once the exam scores are official, candidates may use the authentication codes on their score reports to access the Pearson VUE website for score and photo verification.

These new exam security measures are part of Cisco’s overall strategy to protect the value and integrity of its certifications. Other measures include simulation-based testing, dynamically generated questions and emulations to help ensure that Cisco certified networking professionals continue to have the knowledge, skills, and credentials to perform well on the job.

To find out more about Cisco Career Certifications access the Cisco Learning Network at www.cisco.com/go/learnnetspace.

To sign up for a Cisco exam at a VUE testing center go to http://www.pearsonvue.com/cisco/online/

San Fran Network Admin Saga Over

2008-07-24T20:25:00.004+01:00

The San Fran Network saga that cciepursuit posted about is over. It has all come to a bit of tame end in my opinion. Terry Child's brain must have caught up with his ego or it might be that he was not keen on life in a US jail. Mind you I would not be keen on going to jail in the US or any other country for that matter :-) Anyhow head over to cciepursuit to read his full post.

Study Update 23/07/08

2008-07-23T23:48:00.002+01:00

Things have not been going that well on the study front so far. My new job is exceptionally busy and I do not get as much downtime as I did in my previous job to do reading or watch the Internetwork Expert COD's. That said it has been a good change and I am enjoying it. New jobs however do not go well with CCIE study and on top of that my wife and son were sick, so I had to look after them. Also I need to find a quite place to study which is a bit of a problem at the moment as my desk is in the living room with the TV while some of our other rooms are out of action. Jeez that is a lot of excuses! Anyhow I am moving on with the Internetwork Expert BGP labs at the moment and making slow progress on gathering the required BGP theory. My plan is to really nail the core theory and configuration for the core routing protocols in time for my written exam. I plan to do this by using the Routing & Switching Exam Cert Guide, Routing TCP/IP vols 1 and 2 and Internet Routing Architectures. For the core config I am moving slowly through the Internetwork Volume 1 version 4.1 labs. Once I have completed this I plan on hitting the IPExpert core labs and then I will hit the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 version 5 labs which should be out by the time I finish this lot hell they even might be on version 6 if I take much longer. So a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in :-(

cciepursuit's cool OSPF/EiGRP Trick

2008-07-23T21:50:00.003+01:00

I cannot claim any credit for this as I read about it on cciepursuit's blog quite some time ago (original post here) but this is the only time I have got round to trying it and it is a pretty neat trick in my opinion. It is on what seems like my favorite topic at the moment the network command. Basically cciepursuit posted that instead of having to enter the wildcard when you type in the network command you could type the mask just as you saw it. So as the CLI is worth a thousand word here we go.

Rack1R3(config)#router eigrp 2
Rack1R3(config-router)#network 155.145.167.13 255.255.255.224
Rack1R3(config-router)#do show run | sec eigrp
router eigrp 2
network 155.1.13.3 0.0.0.0
network 155.1.23.3 0.0.0.0
network 155.145.167.0 0.0.0.31
auto-summary

Awesome

2008-07-23T20:46:00.000+01:00

I just logged into the IPExpert website again and found that I must have bought my version 9 workbooks when they introduced their investment protection. So I was pleasantly surprised to find the new version 10 workbooks as well. The new workbook has been divided into 2 workbooks (well 3 actually but I do not have access to volume 3). Volume 1 focuses on the core technologies and there are 22 labs to get you started. This is probably the workbook that I will focus on at the moment. I really need to schedule some rack time with Proctor labs and go through this workbook. The trouble is that at the moment I have not managed to agree a time with the wife that I can dedicate to labbing. I am hoping that I can find some time to agree an 8 hour lab slot once a week. The other problem is trying to synch up the time for a lab slot with the remote labs hosted in the States and me being in Europe it could get interesting. I am not the best without any sleep so I do not want to be starting my labbing at some ridiculous hour of the day. Anyhow I will post a review of the IPExpert version 10 workbooks when I have had a bit more chance to read through them and get some rack time.

CCDE Practical Exam Beta

2008-07-22T22:18:00.003+01:00

I just received the email below from Cisco. So for those of you that are close enough to Chicago and thinking that you can pass the CCDE then go for it. For me I still have a way to go to my CCIE so one step at a time.

Now Available! Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) Practical Exam Beta

Cisco is now registering beta candidates for the Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) Practical Exam. Cisco has finished development of the second exam needed to attain the CCDE certification, the practical exam, and is now soliciting candidates for the beta delivery.

The CCDE practical exam is a computer-based, performance assessment that evaluates a candidate’s ability to gather network requirements, perform design analyses, and implement complex networks.

Cisco will be offering this beta delivery of the exam on October 1, 2008, in Chicago, Illinois, at a Pearson professional testing center. Only candidates that have a passing score on the CCDE qualification exam can register and participate in this exam. Exam beta pricing is $980US and registration inquiries should be sent to ITPC@pearson.com, notifying us of your interest. You will be notified of your eligibility, instructions for registration, payment and logistics in a follow-up email.

Location: Chicago, Illinois USA
Date: October 1, 2008
Cost: $ 980 US

Prerequisite: Passing score of exam 352-001 on the CCDE qualification exam (ADVDESIGN)

For more information on the CCDE program and the CCDE practical exam visit: www.cisco.com/go/ccde or the Cisco Learning Network at www.cisco.com/go/learnnetspace

The Network Command

2008-07-22T07:05:00.004+01:00

The network command seems simple enough does it not? Well actually for years I misunderstood the humble network command not that I knew it at the time. Well see ever since I did my first CCNA all those years ago until fairly recently I always thought you used the network command to specify the networks you wanted to advertise. I was wrong as you will hear quite a few times in the Internetwork Expert CoD's (Class on Demand) the network command is not used to specify the networks you want to advertise. Rather it is used to specify the interfaces you want to participate in a particular routing protocol. Well except in the case of BGP where it is actually used to specify what networks you want to advertise to your BGP peer. However BGP is the exception (there always has to be one of those hey?) and in all other routing protocols it is used to specify what interfaces will participate in the routing protocol. I do not think this was emphasised enough in the CCNA materials I used, although when I get some time I will have a browse through the new CCNA materials and see if they mention this small but in my opinion often over looked fact.

Embedded Packet Capture

2008-07-21T21:58:00.002+01:00

I just saw a post on Embedded Packet Capture on the excellent CCIE in 3 months blog. I had never heard of it before and it looks an awesome tool. I will need to get some test kit together to properly. In the meantime take a look at the full post here

Hectic Day

2008-07-21T20:42:00.005+01:00

Today was a pretty hectic day in work. Things were going fine just had a few bits of QoS configurations to look through and then just as I wanted to go get some lunch all hell broke loose. My Networking Monitoring (NM) application on my machine hung so just as I was about to reboot my PC thinking it was a local problem, then other people started complaining that they could not access their servers. Soon after reports that certain users and several sites could not access their servers started to flood in. It was a really confusing problem we could ping our servers but no Telnet, or RDP access and as I do not have permissions to the servers anymore (I am fully a network guy now no touching servers anymore boo hoo :-( )I could not use the Remote Command Shell to try access any servers. The problem got even more weird when I discoved I could access our NM server again and that there were no alarms showing any network problems but my colleagues right next to me could not access the same server. I found it really frustrating not having full permissions anymore, in my previous job I could have tested up to the application layer by trying to jump on to a server with RDP or telneting on port 25 to an Exchange server. However no such luck anymore I am not the man anymore just another cog in a very big machine. So I am learning you have to really on other people and work much more as a team. I do miss my old job in situations like this but I needed a change and prehaps I was becoming a bit to much like that San Fran network admin who thought he owned the network so good thing I did not go down that road. Anyhow the problem was eventually tracked down to only affecting TCP traffic and after 5 hours the culprit was found. However it did mean I was starving to death and I am a grouchy boy when hungry and only eating after 3 in the afternoon is not good for my mood. It also ment I did not get to do any reading in my lunch hour and my luck did not change when I got home. My wife is sick and so is my child so it looks like any ideas about doing some reading at home are out the window as well :-( Oh well no one said this was going to be easy.

Study Plans

2008-07-21T06:16:00.004+01:00

At the moment I am trying to work my way through understanding fully the major routing protocols. The plan is to really umderstand the major routing protocols before I take my written, which I hope to do at the end of August. I have read TCP/IP Volume 1 as well as the chapters on OSPF and EIGRP in the CCIE Certification Guide 3rd Edition. I have also worked my way through the OSPF and EIGRP sections in the Internetwork Expert Volume 1 Workbook. However at the moment I am working on BGP. Unfortunatly my BGP study plans did not go very well this weekend got caught up doing some decorating and watching the Springboks play Australia which was not good for my blood pressure :-) Hopefully though I will get back on track this week and manage to get through a few more of the BGP labs and solidify my understanding of BGP.

San Fran Network Admin

2008-07-20T07:14:00.004+01:00

CCIE Pursuit has just posted a really interesting article on a rogue network admin in San Francisco head over to his blog to check it out http://cciepursuit.wordpress.com/2008/07/19/weekend-fun-ccie-keeps-city-locked-out-fiberwan-devices/ To me the managers in this mess are just as culpable as the engineer. I mean how did they let this situation continue for years and why did they not ensure that everything was documented just in case something happened to the senior engineer?

Scott Morris and Internetwork Expert

2008-07-17T23:06:00.005+01:00

Well it is old news but since I have only just started blogging Internetwork Expert have acquired Scott Morris. Now in the CCIE world this is big news hey in my little world this is pretty big news. Scott Morris was the first CCIE instructor I ever heard of mainly by reading his column in TCP mag. He was the reason the first materials I bought were from IPExpert. In fact to me Scott was IPExpert and from opinion I get from the other blogs and forums out there many other people saw him in the same way. So the news that he had moved was at that time pretty earth shaking in the CCIE training world. I wondered what would happen to IPExpert would they fold was Internetwork Expert going to be the thousand pound gorilla in the CCIE training world. Initially it seemed that IPExpert would indeed be fading away. However in recent weeks they seem to be generating a bit of a buzz well at least to me anyhow, I am starting to see more and more IPExpert banners on the blogs I read. They have come up with some great new products and ideas. The CCIE blogging site seems a great idea and from some of the stuff I have read their new blended learning solution seems pretty awesome. I also happened to find this blog http://mdownipexpert.blogspot.com/ Now he is not a CCIE trainer his blog says he is a CCIE training advisor but he does seem to have some pretty good ideas on marketing and hey if you are a good blogger and nice to him he is even offering you the chance to earn some freebies. He also has some pretty interesting posts up on his blog about the underside shall we say of the CCIE training market. Anyhow even if IPExpert have lost their glamour instructor they do seem to have some pretty cool ideas up their sleeves and if they can pull them off especially the CCIE blog/community thing I think they will cause a real stir in the market place.

Study Materials

2008-07-17T20:48:00.002+01:00

I have been toying with the idea of doing the CCIE for a little while now and have actually bought all my study materials already. I bought the old IPExpert Version 9 Workbook (not the new blended learning solution) at a time they had a sale on so I got the Proctor Guide, the Class on Demand and the Audio CD's. I was very impressed with the materials however I did not like the fact that the COD did not include actual footage of the command line in action, it was more a series of slides with a lecture and I felt the labs were a bit advanced for me. So in a moment of madness or when I was feeling rich with an intrest free credit card offer I also bought the Internetwork COD with the two workbooks. I still have to get ready for my written exam but I wanted to be doing some work on the CLI at the same time I was reading so I have been working through the Internetwork Expert Version 4.1 Workbook 1 as I read about a technology. I am still working through these labs and am waiting patiently for all the new Version 5 labs to be complete. Investment protection from Internetwork Expert has to be one of the best things about buying your materials from them, as it means that you have access to all the upgrades of the product you bought until you pass your CCIE. For someone like me who wants to retain their family (when they are good :-) ) and their job while they try and study for the CCIE investment protection was a major selling point.

The first steps

2008-07-16T21:37:00.005+01:00

I am starting this blog as some where to keep my study notes and a place to keep track of my progress. I have decided that I am going to try and get my Routing and Switching CCIE however I do have a lot of work and family commitments so this might be a long journey so please bear with me :-) However as they say a journey of a thousand miles begin with the first step so here I go.