[300-135] CCNP TSHOOT - here we go

negru_tudor

Having managed to pass SWITCH (13 Feb 2017) and ROUTE (5 Feb 201 I'm looking at starting work for the final push towards the CCNP R&S

I'm looking at scheduling the exam for the 5th of April right now to give me a little bit of time for a proper review and practice until I sit / wrestle this one. My reasoning is that I'll need to review SWITCH first (haven't been doing too much switching lately, mostly routing) and if I'm feeling lucky, I'll reschedule for an earlier date.

My plan is as follows:

- Review my SWITCH notes and re-lab every little thing up until I can do or troubleshoot half-drunk
- Read the OCG's first chapters (those seem new - the others just re-hash SWITCH and ROUTE)
- Buy Rene Molenaar's "How to Master TSHOOT" course & run through the material
- Do a re-watch of Chris Bryant's vid series + lab along
- Watch any other vid (like Kevin Wallace's Bullseye tips) series for strategies on tackling TSHOOT
- Purchased Cisco's CLN TSHOOT labs (Cisco Learning Labs for CCNP TSHOOT v2.0 50-hour 180-day Labs) and lab along
- Try the GNS3Vault labs for TSHOOT
- Draw the topology in GNS3, get some of my colleagues at work to break it (one thing at a time) & try fixing stuff up
- Sit down with Boson's ExSim and do my "trial by combat"

With a little bit of divine help and some hard work I'll manage a pass - really looking forward to it

Time to get this show on the road!

Cisco Inferno

good luck. your coworkers breaking your lab is a great idea. What company do you work for in Romania?

negru_tudor

Cisco Inferno wrote: »

good luck. your coworkers breaking your lab is a great idea. What company do you work for in Romania?

Thank you for the kind words

Yeap - should be a good idea as long as they break 1 thing at a time to simulate TSHOOT and don't start playing pranks lol (which I know they'll 1000% do)

The company I work for is called Global Convergence Inc. with HQ in Oldsmar, Florida USA; we've been US owned since mid-2015. Our old company, the one I started with in 2010, got bought by GCI so technically I'm in the same place since summer 2010

In other news, tried one of the Boson Exim tests last night just for kicks (without knowing the topology by heart or anything - just dove right in) and got my a$$ kicked by the non-sim questions.. messed 2 tickets as well and failed miserably with a 64% score lol... Down to Earth time, head in the books / notes and hands on the labs.

HappyBearIT

Thats about where my first Boson exam for TSHOOT landed me thanks to the multiple choice and a ticket or two. I'm sure you noticed, but the Boson topology is slightly different than the real thing. However, its close enough so it'll help sharpen your ticket troubleshooting methodology that'll you'll use on the real thing.

negru_tudor

HappyBearIT wrote: »

Thats about where my first Boson exam for TSHOOT landed me thanks to the multiple choice and a ticket or two. I'm sure you noticed, but the Boson topology is slightly different than the real thing. However, its close enough so it'll help sharpen your ticket troubleshooting methodology that'll you'll use on the real thing.

Yeap - keeps you humble / in check alright. I think the fact that the topology is slightly different is a very good thing because it sharpens the overall troubleshooting skills and won't necessarily put *that* much emphasis on memorizing.

The CLN labs also have different topolgies so they ought to help out a little bit more (https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/training-events/le31/le46/cln/store/topologies/tshoot/CCNP_TSHOOT_Lab.html). I admit, if I see a topology, I tend to cram stuff in and learn addressing etc. but shifting things around should help me be comfy even in networks I don't really "belong" in

Ironically, I was just trying to build the topo in GNS3 then resume with reviewing SWITCH topics (my good ol' notes) and Chris' SWITCH vids.

Those multi-choice / non-ticket questions ExSim threw at me kind went way deep into the weeds; got me worried a little bit about what sneaky Cisco could throw my way.

negru_tudor

Physical GNS3 topology is now built. Still need to do the configs, IP addressing etc. ..then turn it over to some trigger-happy people to tear it to shreds ..."a network engineer has recently made several changes to your company's network etc." .. and that's how the fight started !

negru_tudor

Going ahead with the SWITCH review and decided I wanted to test VLANs and "shutdown" state and bumped into a minor but annoying aspect:

- when you issue the shutdown command on a VLAN, the vlan will only go into lshut mode once you EXIT from VLAN configuration mode
- if you stick around and type do show vlan brief the command doesn't take effect

Minor thing but had me trying different devices, reading forums and wasting around 1 hour.

negru_tudor

Good refresher from Chris' course on the root primary or root secondary macros:

- they only run when typed into the CLI - *once*
- if another switch comes onto the network with a hardcoded value lower than the ROOT bridge, it takes over
- the legit ROOT BRIDGE won't monitor & adjust continuously to beat statically-defined bridges on the LAN
- re-running the root primary on the legit ROOT BRIDGE will have it become the root again
- if a rogue bridge with a static priority of 0 comes on the LAN, the root primary macro can't take over:

IOU-SWITCH-1(config)#spanning-tree vlan 1,100 root primary


% Failed to make the bridge root for vlan 1,100
% It may be possible to make the bridge root by setting the priority
% for some (or all) of these instances to zero.


IOU-SWITCH-1(config)#



Remembered a funny quote I saw some time ago about dynamic elections on a network:

"Your network is NOT a democracy! Rig every election you can!"

negru_tudor

Welp been going ahead with reviewing SWITCH, all good so far - it's easier to recall most of the stuff - and I decided to do another Boson ExSim test.

Lo an behold, got all the tickets right and failed the multiple choice questions which led me to a score of 842 which is still a FAIL (846 is required to pass)... Gonna have to dig a little deeper into GRE headers, extended ping and traceroute details.

Perk of the day, GNS3 has a pre-cooked container for ntopng so I was able to do some Netflow within my GNS3 topology today

Back to the ol' drawing board..

negru_tudor

Marching ahead with SWITCH reviewing & made it to GLBP + track objects to reduce / increase AVF weights and active participation in load balancing. That part went well so happy on that front.

However, while rushing through EIGRP configuration, I ran into a situation where one of my GLBP switches (SW-3) would not get the Loopback IP address from the upstream EIGRP router (IOU-R1).



The routers were peering / neighbors alright, just that the darn loopback wasn't present on SW-3; all other switches had it..

..the "eigrp router-id" was identical on both IOU-R1 and SW-3 so they weren't exchanging routes.

Can't say I've tested or ran into this before when studying for ROUTE so yeah..FUN

If you thought that only OSPF had issues with identical router-id config.. well.. think again

albinorhino187

BGP neighbors won't form if they have the same ID either

negru_tudor

albinorhino187 wrote: »

BGP neighbors won't form if they have the same ID either

Aye - dead on the money. With EIGRP they did form a neighbor-ship, that's what was tricky about it.

Almost finished with the video & lab review of SWITCH topics (still have a couple of vids related to SWITCH but from the TSHOOT vid series which is basically a rehash) and so far so good.

I did another Boson test and got smacked silly by the multiple-choice questions.

I also bumped into a feature (I got the right answer but just by elimination) called Protected Ports (switchport protected or port protected) which I can't say I've used or labed until now.

The concept is simple enough:

- any 2 ports labeled / configured with the switchport protected (or port protected on older IOS) command are not able to talk to each other

Some good, straight-forward reads:

- Protected switchports - PacketLife.net
- https://networklessons.com/switching/protected-port-cisco-catalyst-switch/

Anyhow, back to work.. still need to brush up on some stuff.

negru_tudor

On the topic of tunneling IPv6 over an IPv4 network, came across a slight difference / nuance on IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels which I didn't catch when doing ROUTE:

- tunnel mode ipv6ip is actually considered a "Manual" tunnel as per RFC 4213
- tunnel mode gre ip is the Cisco GRE tunnel for tunneling IPV6 over IPv4

One interesting difference about these is that if you use tunnel mode gre ip and have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses assigned to the Tunnel interfaces, you can ping across between them.

If you go for tunnel mode ipv6ip the Tunnel interface only "tunnels" IPv6 over IPv4 traffic. If your tunnels have IPv4 addresses, they won't be able to ping eachother's IPv4 address (or tunnel IPv4 traffic across for that matter); just the IPv6 ones.

Anyway, that's me revisiting IPv6-over-IPv4 static tunnels and nuances between them. Failing is a good way of learning..

negru_tudor

Managed to go through all the Boson simulated exams and I'm overall happy with the outcome / scores on tickets but the multiple-choice or drag-and-drop questions really kicked my a$$.

Plan is to:

- finish all of Chris Bryant's video course
- go through the OCG's first chapters
- buy Rene Molennar's "How to master TSHOOT" book and read it up
- do the Cisco Learning Labs for TSHOOT labs
- give the guys at work a shot at breaking my topology with me trying to find fixes
- potentially re-watch additional vids

With a little bit of luck and several extended study sessions, I might stand a chance at sitting the exam around mid-March. Been going over some of the things we have also lined up for work and planning anything for late-March or April might be a little risky; looking at the week between the 12th - 16th of March.

HappyBearIT

the additional references for those have a cisco doc that describes extended ping and traceroute. I read that doc several times until i memorized the fields of each. Then I drew out the headers in a notebook a few times for gre.

You got this.

negru_tudor

Welp - finished the OCG's first 3 chapters and aside from some CPU and memory related commands (which you'd issue maybe when head-on with TAC), the rest is an "enjoyable" read. First chapter's ITIL rubbish and the "stick to the process" way of troubleshooting and the 2nd one is mostly a review of NTP, SNMP, SPAN/RSPAN, NetFlow and use cases.

I'd say that you'd probably learn a lot more cool stuff about troubleshooting platform issues by jumping on a case or 2 with the TAC guys & gals whenever you get the chance. Had some Fax-over-IP issues lately with a customer of ours and had to get TAC involved to grab some PCM captures and packet captures directly on the ISR gateways - now that's cool stuff to witness & learn

Anyhow, OCG stuff down (figuring out how to read the X axis of the show processes cpu history command was real fun) so gonna move ahead with hitting the Boson references on GRE, ping and traceroute from Cisco's official documentation. Also need to go through Rene's "How to master TSHOOT" book - his stuff should be a good read.

Still have a couple more vids from Chris Bryant that I need to go through (be watching them on the ride to work and back).

Waking up early in the morning to do one or 2 more random ExSim runs; gonna be doing this probably daily until I sit the exam.

Might pull the trigger and sit TSHOOT earlier than anticipated; not saying I'll pass but my patience is wearing out.

negru_tudor

Good read: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/routing-information-protocol-rip/13730-ext-ping-trace.html

negru_tudor

Ladies & gents, been going through the topology diagrams and was wondering if I got the diagram interpreted correctly in regards to the EtherChannel link between DS1 and DS2 (marked it with a red hexagon below)



By the looks of things, it would seem like it's a L3 Etherchannel. The IPv4 topology lists the link as 10.2.4.12/30. This prefix / range doesn't show up anywhere in the L2 topology along with the SVIs for VLANs 10,20 and 200.



I saw the "Layer 3" note underneath R4 but an extra pair of eyes / opinion would help.

HappyBearIT

I configured it as an L3 etherchannel when practicing. Then I played with passive interfaces on the various links to see how it affected receiving routes from R4. Plus, that link is part of the ipv6 topo as well, and its a L3 link there as well.

shortstop20

HappyBearIT wrote: »

I configured it as an L3 etherchannel when practicing. Then I played with passive interfaces on the various links to see how it affected receiving routes from R4. Plus, that link is part of the ipv6 topo as well, and its a L3 link there as well.

Yes, I agree, seems to be a L3 Etherchannel.

negru_tudor

Thanks for chipping in guys. Went and did it as an L3 link; GNS3 topology is fully operational as of today.

Next week I'm handing it over to the guys at work to hack it up with me trying to fix.

Also managed to book the exam today - 5th of March based on testing center availability. One month after ROUTE.

That would leave me 2 more weeks to practice and review stuff; not too bad.

shortstop20

negru_tudor wrote: »

Thanks for chipping in guys. Went and did it as an L3 link; GNS3 topology is fully operational as of today.

Next week I'm handing it over to the guys at work to hack it up with me trying to fix.

Also managed to book the exam today - 5th of March based on testing center availability. One month after ROUTE.

That would leave me 2 more weeks to practice and review stuff; not too bad.

I have mine scheduled for Wednesday. I gotta do some studying this weekend but feeling good about it.

HappyBearIT

Good Luck to both of you. Solidify your tshooting process so locating the device or pair of devices within a few pings and the rest is downhill. Like I said b4, if i had an ip, i started with pinging the inside of R1 and worked backwards. Otherwise I started with the client's switchport. and worked out.

negru_tudor

shortstop20 wrote: »

I have mine scheduled for Wednesday. I gotta do some studying this weekend but feeling good about it.

Good luck! You got this.

negru_tudor

HappyBearIT wrote: »

Good Luck to both of you. Solidify your tshooting process so locating the device or pair of devices within a few pings and the rest is downhill. Like I said b4, if i had an ip, i started with pinging the inside of R1 and worked backwards. Otherwise I started with the client's switchport. and worked out.

Good tip. Appreciate it. I was also pinging the default gw right after R1 so similar approach. If R1 would talk it would tell me to go ping myself by now

HappyBearIT

I chose to start with the inside of R1 since its the last device we have control of, so if the ping to the inside works you know the issue is on R1 itself. If it doesn't work then it has something to do with that link or further inside. Also, If R1 didn't work, I took the half split method and tried an IP on R3 or R4 to quickly narrow down which section of the topology to look at rather than just hopping router by router.

negru_tudor

Took Friday - Sunday off from studying as I felt my head was going to explode. Came back and did 2 Boson tests (1 yesterday and 1 today) and scored 1000 points on each. By now I feel like I'm in dangerous territory - some of those questions I can spot from a mile away so I think the high grade is because of getting used to / memorizing so I'll be switching things around for the time I have left until sitting TSHOOT.

I will move to the Cisco Learning Labs for TSHOOT. Hopefully they'll throw different stuff into the mix which can help me accurately pinpoint any weak areas I need to work on.

I will also re-watch these:

- RIP and filtering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KyPB1Jvxxk

- EIGRP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEQigjD4C5U
- EIGRP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfROHjEG0eg

- OSPF (awesome stuff): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_2JwIcDniE

- Redistribution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kak2pe0LSWQ

- BGP and some MPLS unicast routing as a bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MWqCyInQ94

T -13 days.

negru_tudor

Came across a cool vid from Chris Bryant's TSHOOT series where, on the topic of HSRP tracking, he talks about actually tracking routes in the routing table and using their metric as a Track Object trigger.

Touches upon some interesting bits on metric resolution which kind bites you in the butt when setting thresholds for the track object 'cause they go from 0 - 254. EIGRP metrics are a lot beefier than this so the thresholds here need to be computed after the EIGRP metric of the route is divided by 2160 (metric resolution for EIGRP); IS-IS & static routes have a resolution of 10, OSPF has a resolution of 1.

That's what I call getting into the weeds. Good thing about it is you can actually do some tracking on what routes you have in the routing table and thier metric

negru_tudor

T-4 and counting:

- Doing reviews from notes and Chris Bryant's udemy course
- Random tests from Boson
- Speed drawing the topology on paper (IP addresses, Interfaces, areas etc.). Can't manage to go under the 5 minute mark but that should suffice taking into account the 15 minute buffer time at the beginning to get used to how the test engine works. I'm planning to draw up the topology on one of the laminated pieces of paper provided by the proctor so that I don't have to waste time bouncing around the topology diagram to look up ip addresses.

negru_tudor

T-1 day:

- speed drawing the topology & figuring out what to write on the Vue sheets for memory support (seed metric for EIGRP/RIP & subnets in OSPF redis.)
- OSPF area types (ex. ABR rules the config of the Totally NSSA with the "nssa no-summary")
- Some switch security stuff (DHCP snooping, DAI, VACL, port security etc)
- watching some vids from https://thenetworkcollective.com for entertainment
- review extended PING & TRACEROUTE stuff
- watch some of the salesconnect.cisco.com vids on TSHOOT for IOS platform commands
- probably going to do another Boson run

Regardless of tomorrow's outcome, looking back at when I started my CCNP R&S "adventure" (late 2016) I can say it's complemented my knowledge a lot and not just in regards to Routing & Switching but also ancillary tools / tech (ex. netflow, dot1x, aaa, snmp, control-plane / data-plane separation etc).

My personal feeling is that studying for the RS CCNP helps open a lot of doors. From laying a solid foundation to build upon to understanding a lot of the buzzword tech jargon and what the tech behind it actually does / aims to achieve. For example, I always heard about MPLS-this and MPLS-that and how carriers use it but until you really see BGP in action and what a full-mesh iBGP core means (ouch) you'd be lacking the context to put the info into perspective.

Somehow, regardless of the time it took to get here, it feels like this is only the beginning

Hope my showdown with TSHOOT will be an accurate measurement of the things I've learned over the past 1.5 years

negru_tudor

Just back from the testing center & we have ourselves a PASS (917/1000)

This time around, I did not encounter any bugs in the exam. There was one point where I thought there was a bug / something missing in the answer options but tricky little Cisco threw 2 issues in the same ticket; almost gave me the slip.

The tickets themselves are fair-game and fun to tackle. The multiple choice questions go into the weeds on some topics but the Boson ExSim exam prepares you for those and them some more.

Overall, I think I enjoyed TSHOOT the most out of the bunch & will most likely re-take it going forward if I need to re-cert.

For those who're studying for TSHOOT, I would say that maybe I left too much time between ROUTE and TSHOOT (aprox 1 month); I'd say somewhere around the 2 week mark for reviewing ROUTE & SWITCH should do and then tackle TSHOOT.

Feels good & I've learned a lot so there's good value overall in the RS track still.

Best of luck for any of you guys & gals still soldiering on & lab, lab, lab then lab some more!