After two weeks of partying like the Wolf of Wall Street (yeah right) I have decided to brush off the lab and return to studying for my second CCIE in SP. I plan to take the V4 written on the first day it is available (May 2015) and the lab soon after.
Similar to my R&S thread, I will use this to track my progress and general thoughts and I will use my blog to write up more details about some of the technologies on the SP blueprint and other networking related things. One thing I like about tracking progress in these types of threads as that it makes you somewhat accountable in progressing your learning.
My reading list for this will be:
- MPLS Fundamentals (already read many times)
- MPLS Traffic Engineering
- BGP Design and Implementation
- Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 (for IS-IS)
- QoS for MPLS
- MPLS VPN Architectures 1 and 2
- IOS XR Fundementals
I will also use my INE All Access Pass until it runs out to watch ATC videos and the SPv3 workbook.
I am going to stop using web-IOU and try to use unetlab exclusively because it is easy to create large routing topologies with a few XR instances and 10+ XE instances using CSR1KV. I will buy another box that I can run ESXi on which will be used exclusively for running the unetlab master, and still have enough memory to run several XRv's (3GB RAM minimum per instance).
Three hours of reading and labbing today:
1) MPLS Route Target Constraint - I really like this feature, especially when used with route reflection, to prevent RRs from sending VPNv4/v6 prefixes to PE routers who are just going to drop them anyway. If you have ever used question mark when writing
address-family under BGP you may have seen
rtfilter - this is what route target constraint uses.
2) Some IS-IS basics such as neighbour establishment, levels, default routing between levels when the L1/L2 router sets the ATT bit on the LSP
3) IS-IS route leaking from L2 to L1 and also from L1 to L2 (to prevent L1 routes from entering the L2)
