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

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

Enjoy the holidays

No studying for 1 week !

Labbing it up : Lab layout

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

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

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.

God wants me to be a CCIE

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 …..