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.