1st CCIE lab attempt blog and help for candidates.

Turgon

A couple of hours working on the BGP section and observing the behavior of the BGP and routing tables. Ran out of time to do more today and the next session is booked on the remote racks. I will carry on with IWEB vol III lab no 3 tommorow. I want to look into the BGP section in more detail.

Had to change the IP address of R3 e0/1 to put it on the same subnet as BB2. This afternoon I was logged into the remote rack and the PC just rebooted itself. This happens on the home PC but has never done so on my laptop. Im really not sure what causes this but it's annoying as I cant spend long sessions on the home PC with my large HP w2207h screen.

Never mind. More BGP tommorow.

Turgon

With my wife off to the movies with a girlfriend I made a start on the Duggan no 3 lab on the home rack this evening. Had some problems until the frame switch was reconfigured correctly and all cables firmly pushed in on the 4000 series.

Completed the frame relay section including changing mtu and ip mtu ospf ignore added to get over ospf adjacency problems later on in the lab. Good to get this lab underway. Also revisited my books tonight to look over some BGP fundamentals which I will be working with hands on in the morning when I complete the BGP section of IWEB Vol III lab no.3. Work has not been completely crazy this week to here's hoping I get some lab time in tommorow.

dynamik

Turgon wrote:

With my wife off to the movies with a girlfriend...

I totally read that as your wife was off, so you went to the movies with a girlfriend. Oh well, have fun with your non-female rack...

Turgon

8AM. Another short early session before work to finish off the BGP section in IWEB Vol III lab no 3.

Turgon

The ability to save configs and reload them on the IWEB racks is a great timesaver when it works, but Im finding it buggy. This morning I had the tail end of a session to get some work done but repeated attempts to load my saved configs through the control panel just didn't work at all. As a consequence I haven't been able to do anything useful this morning. I have sent a report to support about this because it's costing me time and money. Perhaps they will give me some credits back.

So I have had to bump the work and schedule the following session. How much I will get done is a variable as I have a lot on at work today but there is always lunch time. I hope the configs load this time because starting from scratch would be sucky.

Meanwhile I will do 15 minutes on the homerack and the Duggan lab to try and accomplish something.

Turgon

Configured the switching and ATM section in the Duggan lab at home.

IWEB Vol III lab no 3 - DONE

Spent some time going over BGP. I got the previous configs loaded about a couple of hours into the session. Rubbish. At least they loaded but again, more lost time in my session. I got a bit of BGP table observation time. Have scheduled the following session so I can try and upload the full solution and have a more detailed look this evening. Im still unsure why the redistribution into BGP is really necessary on this lab, so far as I can tell routers have got routes to get to these BGP networks. One odd ball was R1 which was giving a next hop for it's BGP prefixes as the frame relay interface of R5. Very strange.

Will have a look later and try and trace things through. I still need more time with BGP but I think I learned a fair amount in this lab. Im working more patiently with backbone routers these days. Useful things, particularly with filtering feedback to the backbone routers if the EGP peer is in the same EIGRP AS as the upstream backbone router. I need to understand the redistribution better on this lab though. Why it was really needed. Very important things to reflect on and research in the BGP solution given in the workbook. The route back for the backbones was a classic. Need to watch out for that. Ensure backbones have route back to routers by advertising an aggregate address for the AS. I didn't get this all correct but it's ok. I think there are lots of lessons to be had in lab no 3 so I will be thinking about it some more when I look it over tonight. The BGP tables, the routing tables. Knowing when to redistribute. Knowing what to look for as pointers and what constitutes a healthy BGP and routing table. EBGP peers sent their interface as next hop (expected). IBGP peers passed that on.

A frustrating day. Three IWEB sessions taken to do 2 or three hours work. At least I got somewhere with the rack at home and the Duggan lab. ATM point-to-point worked ok. No virtual-template with the IOS running (no aalciscoppp frame type available) so just put the ip address of the point-to-point subinterface. Overcome lack of a broadcast command in the IOS by using ip ospf network point-to-point. pings work. Cool.

Turgon

Ok. Four of the IWEB Vol II labs done. Three of the IWEB Vol III labs done. There are a slew of technologies I need to work on in the weeks ahead. I would like to get some coverage of those until the end of October before I attempt a mock exam. I will make plenty of notes and read those in the evenings. At the same time I want to keep practicing the core and keep improving across the piece. Given that the IWEB racks allow you to preload a Vol II lab at any given point (when it works), I think my approach will be to load up a lab at the point that the core is done and batter on with the remaining tasks i.e multicast, QoS, IP services, security, IPv6. I plan to do this for a few of the labs for a while and take some notes. I think I will start with lab 20 and work backwards. At some point each week I will do a Vol III lab to keep up on the core practice each week.

Im printing off lab 20 now to have a read and will probably attack it tommorow. If I get down to it I can improve on a lot of areas the next six weeks before mocks which will run periodically to year end while I fine tune my practice on particular configurations I need to get down for the actual lab attempt in spring.

GT-Rob

Its funny you say that because last night I actually sat down and read through a difficulty 10 lab for the first time (lab 14). Overall, it looks pretty tough. There is a LOT of "set up this, but you can't do it this way or this way or this way". I try to explain to people that the CCIE is not about knowing how to do a task, its about know every possible way it can be done lol


I think I am just going to keep going in order. IE has said it doesn't really matter what order you do them in, but its easy for me to just plow through them that way I guess. Then mix Vol III labs in on weekends/slow work days.


Im starting to feel like you though, about how the core feels solid (except the odd BGP case), and its the rest that is lacking sometimes. My multicast is a mess, and sometimes IP services and Security throw me in a loop of "is that even possible?" lol Thank god they are only worth a couple of points (I hope).



Also, I share your frustration with IE. I don't know if other vendors have the same problems, but it can be a real pain. Sometimes I can't even get the members site to load in the first place. I've had the scheduler take 5+ mins just to load. Everytime I talk to them though they say they were "working on something at the time".

They are pretty generous folks though. I am sure if you made a fuss they would throw some tokens at you.


Oh well, back to lab 3 for me :P

Turgon

Thats about the long and short of it. Knowing different ways to do things comes with practice and understanding how stuff really works. We will get there.

Done looking over the BGP and routing tables on lab no 3 now. Redistribution makes more sense now. You get a clean routing table so to speak with IGP routes to BGP prefix's instead of iBGP routes with an AD of 200. With the exception of eBGP routes of course with AD = 20. These stay in the routing table.

R2 has a hell of a lot of D EX routes in there thanks to all the redistribution on R6 and R5. Check it out when you load that final config. Also dont expect to see that BGP aggregate route /5 to appear in R5. It isn't running BGP

GT-Rob

Ya I didn't enjoy lab 3 very much. I couldn't get that stupid BVI working right, and it messed up my redistribution and BGP. I really don't know what it was, it was like I had connectivity, but I didn't. R1, R3, and R6 had connectivity between each other, but would keep dropping packets, which would make all the neighbors keep dropping. After a few hours of messing with it I ended up just turning G0/0 into a routed port and moving on. Ugh. I even watched the CoD vid for the topic but still could not see what I was missing. Maybe a typo somewhere. Maybe a hardware issue.


oh well. Lab 4 is booked for next tuesday.


PS my configs failed to save


PPS I forgot to ask you, did you buy your tokens in bulk from IE? If not, they usually give you a discount if you do (especially if you buy workbooks etc from them).

Turgon

Yes I buy tokens in bulk. More cost effective.

7AM - Looking over lab 20 before starting work.

Turgon

GT-Rob wrote:

Ya I didn't enjoy lab 3 very much. I couldn't get that stupid BVI working right, and it messed up my redistribution and BGP. I really don't know what it was, it was like I had connectivity, but I didn't. R1, R3, and R6 had connectivity between each other, but would keep dropping packets, which would make all the neighbors keep dropping. After a few hours of messing with it I ended up just turning G0/0 into a routed port and moving on. Ugh. I even watched the CoD vid for the topic but still could not see what I was missing. Maybe a typo somewhere. Maybe a hardware issue.


oh well. Lab 4 is booked for next tuesday.


PS my configs failed to save


PPS I forgot to ask you, did you buy your tokens in bulk from IE? If not, they usually give you a discount if you do (especially if you buy workbooks etc from them).

If you cant get the lab to work, put the entire solution together following the solution guide and try and understand where you went wrong. Im not sure which BVI you are referring to. R1, R3 and R5 should work fine with multipoint.

Turgon

IWEB Vol II lab No. 20 (Second Half - Multicast, IPv6, QoS, IP Services, Security) - DONE

A good session. Made notes on anything I skipped or got wrong. Learned a few useful things and got practice in on configurations I had forgot.

Turgon

Finally got done with cleaning the whole house. Time to settle down now and print off and file all the remaining IWEB Vol II labs. I bought some Arch files for them today. To make space Im clearing the shelves onto which have amassed notes taken from labs done earlier in the year. There's also some old workbook material and notes there from way back in 2003 when I last attempted to prepare for the lab. I was going well back then but work and life forced a hiatus. It just wasn't possible to get enough quality rack time in at that time. It's interesting looking back on the drawings, labs and notes I made back then.

Once the Vol II labs are filed Im going to go over them and try and put a systematic study schedule together to take me through until the end of October.

GT-Rob

That sounds like a good plan. Organization and structure is the key to success

Turgon

GT-Rob wrote:

That sounds like a good plan. Organization and structure is the key to success

It certainly helps although I try not to overdo it. There's a tendancy to overplan. You spend too much time on planning and not enough time actually doing. But that's a potential problem in lots of walks of life.

Definitely a planning evening tonight though. Im turning the labs over while I have a beer and listing the topics that come up. Sunday I hope to be back on racks, either Vol II lab no 19 (all topics after BGP) or the IGP section of Duggan lab no 3 on the homerack. Depends on IWEB labslot availability really.

Im shooting to do labwork every day now. Even an hour on really busy days is helpful. I think if you can get a lot of racktime in it's very useful, but regularity is the key. It's no good cramming for a few weeks then tailing off due to burnout. Regularity and elapsed time to get around all the topics and back again and give yourself time for things to sink in seems best. I have momentum now and more things come more easily. Been at it 18 months now on and off. Things slowed down a bit when our son was born last September and for a while after. Then work was the priority in May so studies went on the backburner again that month. But things have picked up since then and the agreement at home is to start doing a couple of evenings after work and one day of racktime each weekend.

I hope to get as much done as possible by the end of this year.

Turgon

Spent Sunday going over the IWEB Vol II labs to identify topics that regularly appear that I need to work harder on. Back on racks today lab no.19 the topics post BGP.

JohnDouglas

Not sure if any CCIEs look at the forum, but I was wondering Turgon after you've put all these hours in to get the CCIE lab, how many hours do you think it'll take to maintain your level of knowledge?

I mean, to keep the cert valid is one thing, i think it's "just" keeping the ccie written up to date? But, to really keep all the lab skills up? is that possible?

GT-Rob

IMO, and this is just my opinion, but a good amount only is applicible with the lab.


Being able to redistribute RIP, into OSPF, then running BGP on top through an IPv6 tunnel, probably is not going to come up in the real world too often! But thats what the lab is about, the idea that you can handle just about any situation.


But keeping everything else sharp will come from the job I would hope. Also in the real world, you usually have time to look things up, so if you were not as fresh as you once were years down the road, its not as big of deal. Not many places require you to set up everything they throw at you in a lab in 8 hours.


Even with just troubleshooting problems, the core topics will always come up. Switching, WAN tech., IGP and BGP, is running in pretty much every network. So these things should remain pretty sharp.

Turgon

JohnDouglas wrote:

Not sure if any CCIEs look at the forum, but I was wondering Turgon after you've put all these hours in to get the CCIE lab, how many hours do you think it'll take to maintain your level of knowledge?

I mean, to keep the cert valid is one thing, i think it's "just" keeping the ccie written up to date? But, to really keep all the lab skills up? is that possible?

You won't use everything you cover in lab prep in the field that's for sure. Change control is one reason and there are others....

I do think you are more likely to retain knowhow if you go for a long period of immersion as opposed to bashing through the program. Even so some things will go cool after time. Inevitable really. That said, the transformation you go through to get the CCIE will help you recover things you lose later on, providing you dont move away from those technologies for too long.

I think the main thing is that if you prepare thoroughly and explore things as you go along then the insights of the capabilities of a technology will stay with you for a long time. This opens lots of possibilities for you in the world of work when you encounter different situations, even new situations as new technologies emerge. A well trained CCIE will know what a technology is capable of and how it actually works.

As for the details..well yes those will become blurred but your ability to revisit those details should be fairly good.

Covering the necessary lab footprint to get up to exam standard does indeed take a long time. Lab prep is no 3 on my priority list after family and work so I have necessarily been at it a while. That said I have covered over 400 hours of racktime and a couple of hundred hours reading. Even so, some candidates put in 1000 plus hours of racktime before clearing the lab.

While I expect my rack hours to come in below 1000 before I nail this thing I do have years of experience and did prepare for the CCIE lab back in 2003 before work and travel commitments forced me to mothball my preparations. It all helps!

Today looked over the spanning-tree and BGP Best Path questions and solutions in the first 10 IWEB Vol II labs and made some notes. A good refresher.

Had a very brief look at the multicast section in lab no 19 on a remote rack. Will configure the rest tomorrow.

Turgon

A busy day at work again but with an early start I managed to get a couple of hours in working on the multicast and IPv6 sections in Vol II lab no 19. I will finish the rest tomorrow. Useful time spent verifying the multicast neighbors and rp mappings the mroute table and the RIPng table.

JohnDouglas

nice replies turgon and gt. thanks.

Turgon

7:30 AM. Preparing to complete IWEB lab no 19. The QoS, Security, System Management and IP Services sections.

Last night completed looking over the BGP Best Path sections of labs 6, 7 and 8 and made notes. Gathered my IPexpert notes from March which documented various IGP configurations and redistribution. I intend to look these over later today.

Turgon

IWEB Vol II Lab no.19 - QoS, Security, System Management, IP Services - DONE

Useful exercise forcing me to revisit the books for FRTS and the theory for be. Interesting use of a tunnel for HSRP tracking. The obvious choice of simply tracking the frame relay interface wouldn't be helpful if there was a problem at the far end of the link with Frame being connectionless. Tunnel between R3 and R1 required for tracking as a far end failure of R3 would still leave R1 frame physical interface showing up/up which would not indicate a failure and a necessary HSRP flip to the standby router to give a useful gateway for VLAN 127 hosts.

A tunnel is needed for tracking the entire frame link.

If the far end frame interface fails the line protocol on the tunnel would go down giving useful tracking of the status of the Frame Link end to end.

Question may need updating though as it talks about R1 losing the connection to the frame relay cloud.

Turgon

Cisco Press CCIE Practice Lab no 3 on the home rack when I get a chance today. On completion I shall probably use the topology for some experimentation to practice IGP configurations which I have recorded in my note book from earlier this year.

Turgon

Duggan lab no. 3. Completed the EIGRP section and learned alternative to the neighbor statement. Useful.

Calling a halt now as it was a fairly busy day at work today and I expect to be pretty busy with a new design tomorrow. Need some rest. Will try and get through the rest of the IGP work in this lab sometime on Friday.

Turgon

7AM - Duggan lab no. 3. Home rack work again and the IGPS.

Turgon

8AM - Back on the home rack with the Duggan lab and OSPF. Shopping later with the family so an early start!

Turgon

A useful couple of hours finishing the OSPF and redistribution section on the home rack for Duggan lab no 3. The experience is flowing much better than when I last encountered a Duggan lab, no 2 back in March. So the hardwork is paying off and Im much more on the ball with everything and understanding things better. The BGP section will be next which no doubt will offer lots of useful practice. I did the ISDN section, not because it's on the lab these days (it isn't), but simply because I could. I have an 2B-D ISDN switch emulator. Doing ISDN won't kill you and the experience of learning it hands on can still reap benefits as it covers fundamentals used by other technologies in the lab exam and in the real world. ISDN is still to be found lurking in data centres so watch out new CCNAs.

Shopping shortly and perhaps later a return to the homerack to start the BGP section. We are up on 450 hours of racktime accumulated now and while there is still a hell of a lot of work to do Im very pleased with how things are going in terms of fundamental learning, configuration awareness, issue spotting and verification. It's all improving and coming together now. Between now and Christmas I will be working very hard to continue to get technologies down better across the topics and crucially the ability to manipulate things..BGP attributes and path selection, IGP metrics, summaries, redistribution, spanning-tree.. and various forms of filtering..BGP filtering, multicast filtering, traffic filtering. QoS, Security, and IP Services will also be hit hard.

Once this Duggan lab is complete on the homerack, I intend to use the topology for lots of experimentation and verification practice with the various technologies. For this I will go over things I have highlighted in the Vendor workbooks as well as material I have identified in the Solie books. There are also permutations of things I want to look at in more detail with the associated verification tools so the feel of their operation springs more readily to mind when Im working practice scenarios. Area types, network types, IGPs over Frame..various things.

Turgon

8AM - Duggan lab no. 3. BGP section

Sleepless nights as our son who just turned 1 year old is being weened off night feeding. Up early then today so time to carry on with the Duggan lab no. 3. BGP section next up.