The struggle towards knowledge and CCIE

Labbing it up : BGP head to toe

sebastiaannoppe — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 12:21:20 +0000

Been a while since I posted here so lets get things started.
I have rebuilded my lab for practicing BGP. It consists out of 7 2600 routers, of which 5 of them carry 64Mb of memory. The IOS versions defer from one another and I know this is not so good but this is how real life is. IPS’s and clients will not be running the same version of IOS on their infrastructure so I do not see the harm of doing so in my lab aswell.

The time I made by going trough the theory is already negated by the time i need to process the actual configuration. I had some bad luck over the last days personnaly which rendered my unable to do labs. The exam date was sheduled for next monday but no way that I can get there now. Possible need to reset it 1 week or more.

Well back to the routers, BGP backdoors coming up !

Posted in Certification - other, Labbing it up

Grey matter overload

sebastiaannoppe — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:13:35 +0000

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m heading up towards CCIP, BGP being first on the list.
I must say, the beginning chapters of “Internet Routing Architectures” are boring a tiny bit boring. It’s nice to know the ORIGIN (get it … ) of the Internet but 2 chapters is a bit much.

I’m up to chapter 6 now, being the biggest one of all 12. Must say that the book does provide a very good view on BGP. The commands only start rolling in around chapter 10 but this isnt the least boring. With clear examples, everything is described nicely.

Hopefully, by the end of today, I’ll be around chapter 8 and by the end of the week I’ll be neck deep in labs.

Posted in General

CCNP

sebastiaannoppe — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:59:17 +0000

So I just passed BSCI with a 944 score. Not bad if i do say so myself. Onwards to CCIP now with the following order : BGP -> MPLS -> QOS
I’m taking one day off from studying, get all the materials together to start BGP. Hopyfully, I can pass it by the end of this month , that would put me right on track.

Posted in General

Exam day

sebastiaannoppe — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:11:33 +0000

Yes, today is the day I finish my CCNP (lets cross fingers). Have the appointement at noon so expect to hear back from me around 3′o clock.

Posted in General

Lets get moving

sebastiaannoppe — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:19:56 +0000

Time for me to finish up on BSCI. Next week, i’ve planned to start with BGP for the CCIP exam

Posted in General

Labbing it up : NBMA , that’s American basketball right ?

sebastiaannoppe — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:55:00 +0000

In this series of “Labbing it up” , I present to you the troubles that have haunted me the beter part of this morning.
I was trying to configure a text book example of NBMA Frame Relay cloud with only 3 routers.
Like so :

The configuration I was trying to deploy involved mapping my 2 dlci’s (of my below routers) to their ip’s on the top routers serial interface.

int s0/0 (on r14)
ip address 10.1.14.1
encapsulation frame-relay
frame-relay interface-dlci 101
frame-relay map ip 10.1.16.1 116 broadcast
frame-relay map ip 10.1.15.1 115 broadcast

For some reason , this didnt work. I started to debug and when i did a “debug frame-relay packet” and performed a ping , I quickly noticed i didnt even have ip reachability. Seems that the map ip command doesnt like gns3 FR simulators. After removing these commands, I got back full reachabilty and my dlci were found automaticly (verified with show frame-relay pvc).

The main reason that I lost so much time today was the fact that I had this setup working in the morning using sub interfaces (p-t-mp) so i excluded my FR simulator too quickly as a possible source of problems.

Now, it could be that i’m totally wrong about this, so if you something I quite possibly don’t, please drop a line.

Above all, I learned one thing today : review CCNA

Posted in Labbing it up

Enjoy the holidays

sebastiaannoppe — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 09:43:48 +0000

No studying for 1 week !

Posted in General

Labbing it up : Lab layout

sebastiaannoppe — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:47:57 +0000

Surely , I cannot refrence a lab without posting some more info about it.

Some of you might recognize it. It a lab from CBT nuggets. I find this lab to be big enough to put everything in it that is needed for the BSCI exam and with a simple cloud, i can branch it to some real life equipment to add some switches for the CCIE exam. Can i run all routers without crashing my pc ? Sure but i’ll have to be real carefull for not creating loops

Posted in Labbing it up

Labbing it up : The one where windows is behaving as usual or …

sebastiaannoppe — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:40:44 +0000

Time for a series of posts ! I figured that each step towards my goal(s) can be categorized. In this series, I will discuss my lab time. This will obvisouly include my victories, my downfalls and why may pc exploded once again.

So like you should already know, i’m occupied reviewing my BSCI material, exam planned in the near future. This obviously includes doing the labs. So there I was, having me a nice dynamips/gns3 lab when all of a sudden, completly out of the blue,murphy’s law ³, ……………. it just stopped.

No more console access, no more dynamips server running and offcourse no way of fixing it besides starting over completly. Many a time have I searched the internet and 99% off all sites say that the most stable platform is Linux with MacOS close second. However, today was not the day I was simply going to say OKE (poëtic isnt it). I present to you, the new king of the hill :

Windows XP Media Center Edition

Back on my old laptop , I have this beautifull piece of a OS working. Video playback , faster mpeg coding, the works. I tought to myself, what the heck, lets try it out. And tadaa tadaa it works like a charm. So far, I’m only limited based on the fact that the laptop is more then 5 years old and thus I do not have the hardware specs to simulate the internet … but what the hell, it works.

Proof once more that some monkeys at MS know how to write down some code.

Posted in Labbing it up

God wants me to be a CCIE

sebastiaannoppe — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:38:47 +0000

During my off time in between chapters, I was rewiring some of my pc cables. Just then I spotted an old cable splitter from my previous ISP. I decided to pull it out. Unfortunatly, I pulled a bit too hard and bam, there came off the connecter of the cable.

Not a big issue since I no longer have cable internet, quite a big one since I have cable TV.

So my conclusion is clear. God wants me to continue studying , not slacking off.

And top that with the fact that I forgot to book my BSCI exam, no spots left before the end of the year. So there goes my previous post. Rebooking for 5 jan.

Time like these …..

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