WoW it has been a long time

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

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

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

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



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



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

To Bootcamp or Not to Boot Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has to be an easier way

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

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

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

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

Network Analysis

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

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

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

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

State of the Ferret 07/01/09

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

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

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

Study Update 15/12/08

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

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

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

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

Commands: ispf

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

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

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

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

IPExpert Dynamips Configs

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

IPExpert Announcement Arrives

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

Update 27/11/08

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

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

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

CCIE Shorts 16/11/08

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:

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

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

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?

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

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

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.