1st CCIE lab attempt blog and help for candidates.

Turgon

Having to spend today polishing off a tedius network design document for work. I shall probably attempt lab 'H' very soon when I return to my studies.

Turgon

7:57 am UK time. Doing some studying. Solie CCIE Practical Studies Volume II Chapter 2 Configuring Route Maps and Policy Based Routing.

Turgon

Wow. This thread has almost 15000 views! Happy New Year to you all whatever you are studying in 2008.

Pash

I am enjoying reading this thread Turgon and I know others are following it as well, it's interesting to see how you are spending your time leading up to your lab. I like your philosophy regarding lab attempts........in that from the first attempt you are there to kill it not to "experience" it.

Happy new year to you to mate.

Turgon

Now reading lab 'H' and making notes and checking DocCD prior to lab session.

Turgon

Lab 'H'

Looked over and bottomed out the WAN and Switching sections. Got through these sections pretty well and referred to DocCD for PPP points. Produced a diagram with all the IPs defined for the interfaces. Tonight did a rack section focusing on the switching points. Configured the three switches and covered all points in short order. Note to self to read up on MST, root bridge placement, port security and switchport backup interfaces. Pleasing work.

Turgon

Went over the IGP sections. I will rack these today including redistribution. This lab is flowing quite well and my drawings improve.

Turgon

Note to self, eigrp metrics in solutions make no sense. No split horizon used on frame hub to get eigrp working. Now looking at the IPv6 sections an area I need to revisit.

jbaello

More power to you mate!

Turgon

jbaello wrote:

More power to you mate!

Thanks a lot jbaello. Short of lab time today so I hammered out the frame configuration for speed practice and looked over IPv6 and QoS sections of the latest lab in some detail. IPv6 configuration was fairly intense but I can see how it hangs together. I will back this up with some IPv6 reading very soon.

Hopefully I can build out the whole lab across this weekend. It offers lots of IPv6 situations and PPP tweaks to name a few. Multicast section made a lot of sense.

Turgon

Did the WAN, RIP and EIGRP sections. Ran out of time for the rest. Good practice on authentication modes. Need to take care with passive interfaces. Will try passive-interface default next time and enable the interfaces required. Redistribution between RIP and EIGRP did not show up. Will try again soon. Choosing the root port didn't work out either on the switching section.

Turgon

Reconfigured the home rack for the EIGRP technology lab which I will continue with on Tuesday.

Turgon

Just completed lab 6 covering all manner of EIGRP configurations with full reachability. A very instructional lab and well worth doing. On that note I have now crossed the 200 hour mark on rack time since May last year! We should be getting to camp 1 before the end of the month now with a mock exam thrown in for good measure. I have abandoned the plans to complete labs I,J and K for now and instead decided to revisit the remaining technology labs to complete the milestone of reaching camp 1 as described in my signature. Once there I will press on with the assault on camp 2..the remaining multiprotocol labs and getting some speed up on the core followed by more mocks.

Cool.

eigrp..

timers ->network statement -> adjacency -> routes

Turgon

Time to bite the bullet and do Lab 8 Routing Protocol Redistribution on the home lab. Will start prestaging the configs later today. On a personal note I make that 9 months of hands on lab preparations since I set up the rack last year. I feel like I have come a long way during the 200 hours I have put in. I understand things in context much better and my configuration, thought process and verification is much smoother. I expect the next 100 hours to really build on this essential foundation. It promises to be quite a tranformation.

Turgon

Saturday morning lab UK time. Now working through lab 8

Turgon

This technology lab covering redistribution went well. I spotted the redistribution points quickly. I need to practice route-map and ACL definitions. Various redistribution options came up such as bgp redistribute-internal and redistribute ospf 2 match internal external 1. While I can follow how everything works I need to practice route-maps until I can put them together quickly.

I think I will now revisit the QoS technology lab again, I first started to configure this one in August of last year. I will just look it over. Then I will press on with the remaining technology labs in IPExpert before returning to the multiprotocol labs again in the workbook. January is shaping up nicely and Im satisfied with the incremental progress working on the various labs. Some things are starting to stick and make a lot more sense now. If I can cover the remaining technology labs, then the multiprotocol journey becomes more rewarding with each lab, and I can work on speed and reading the DocCD.

Debugs have been used with each lab and they continue to teach me more each day.

Turgon

Configured the different QoS solutions in lab 12 to refresh the memory on QoS alternatives and examine different configurations namely: FRTS, GTS, CQ, Flow based WRED, PQ, CAR, MLS-QoS, WFQ, NBAR, CBWFQ using MQC and DCSP marking. Understanding how solutions meet requirements is making a lot more sense and the configurations seem less difficult somehow.

Turgon

Saturday morning on the home rack. Spent an hour polishing off the last few QoS tasks on lab 12. Time to take stock. I have looked over the remaining technology labs and will press on with their completion now. Some shouldn't take too long like HSRP redundancy and Advanced Router Management so I will attack those first. QoS conversions, IPv6 Advanced Routing, ACLs and Cisco Router Security I shall do in that order as they each require more time than the previous exercise. I shall probably spend more than the estimated time to get the most from them. Certainly good learning opportunities in these labs.

This should take me to camp 1 at last!

After that I have a whiteboard filled with plans to attend to. One approach I have hashed out is to attack all the QoS sections covered in each of the multiprotocol labs, about 15 sections, followed by doing all the multicast sections covered in each of the multiprotocol labs, 13 sections. The underlying IP structure may be slightly different for each lab so I need to watch out for that and adjust the solution accordingly and I will also need to take care to remove the section I have finished before starting the next one so we dont have conflict. This process will give me complete immersion in the topics of multicast and QoS though which will be VERY helpful.

The climbing has been good of late.

Turgon

Sunday morning 7.29am. Starting to work on the router redundancy lab I looked over last night. Lab no 14.

dynamik

7:29am? Are you across the pond? I'm just getting ready to go to sleep...

It's really been interesting following your progress. Thanks for taking the time to share it with us.

I'm definitely going to have to reread this all in 12-18 months when I'll be in a better position to understand more of the technical details. Technical ignorance aside, it's still been educational just to see all that's involved.

Keep up the great work. We're all pulling for you.

Turgon

dynamik wrote:

7:29am? Are you across the pond? I'm just getting ready to go to sleep...

It's really been interesting following your progress. Thanks for taking the time to share it with us.

I'm definitely going to have to reread this all in 12-18 months when I'll be in a better position to understand more of the technical details. Technical ignorance aside, it's still been educational just to see all that's involved.

Keep up the great work. We're all pulling for you.

hehehe..yes Im in Great Britain. Just do a few simple configurations involving a few routers and run those debugs..its how you learn!

Thanks

Turgon

Lab 14 Router Redundancy - Done.

This really was a useful lab covering HSRP and VRRP. It's all in there, virtual ip address, virtual mac address, groups, priority, preemption, authentication and timers. Interesting work tracking routes and changing priority accordingly. Similarly using ip sla to track and decrement priority based on protocol behaviour i.e ping time exceeding 80ms to an address.

Useful stuff on sla monitor.

My 2500 series couldn't handle vrrp or multiple hsrp groups although secondary IP addressing was obviously possible. This is required if using VLANs for each network is not an option.

Very good. I will look over lab 16 Advanced Router Management covering SNMP, RMON, Syslog, NTP, WCCP, DRP, CNS, Logging and Command Scheduling this afternoon.

But it's 10:40 am on a Sunday morning, so I think will take a break and spend time with my wife and young son and cook everyone some breakfast before I do all that

Happy Sunday whereever you are!

Turgon

Lab 16 Advanced Router Management - Done. Quite an educational lab this one covering advanced router management features. Certainly useful to know where these things are on the DocCD. Note to self to read up on DRP (distributed director), kron command scheduler, RMON and CNS, Cisco Networking Services.

Turgon

Lab 17 - QoS Conversions. Yesterday evening I looked over the whole of this lab and I will be configuring it today on the home rack. It covers policing traffic on VLANs, QoS on Catalyst switches, conversion of priority queuing to CBWFQ, DSCP values, custom queuing conversion to MQC, NBAR and FRTS.

Turgon

8am onwards.

Lab 17 - QoS Conversions - Done.

This lab wasn't so bad. One thing it looks at is converting Custom Queuing and Priority Queuing to a CBWFQ/MQC solution. These conversions are essential preparation as they could easily come up in the QoS section of the lab exam. They do require practice. My IOS version limited the protocols I could match on for my class-maps so I just had to live with that. Looking at the solutions I get it but it's clear that I will need to practice the various QoS configurations in the months ahead. Interesting to see service-policy applied both inbound and outbound on the same interface, and the use of NBAR to match on JPEG attached files or video content by inspecting the http payload. Some good work covering MQC.

Im getting around most of the configurations now across the entire R&S track. On the whole, things make a good deal of sense. It will be important that I work hard on the areas I need to improve on. My task interpretation is getting better, although it was pretty good to start off with. Certainly I will be revisiting many topics in an attempt to get better at defining necessary configurations to meet requirements for things like QoS.

Next lab is lab 11 IPv6 Advanced Routing and I can't say this is my favorate subject. I shall look it over before doing it on the home rack. I expect to be reading the IPExpert primer on IPv6 very soon.

Turgon

Looked over the lab last night. It's a good one. Spent a couple of hours doing the Ipv6 addressing on the interfaces and getting it working over frame relay. Time well spent. Having taken my time over it I can really see how Ipv6 hangs together and Im much more comfortable with the basic configuration. OSPFv3, virtual-links, BGP address families, route reflectors, prefix lists, ipv4 unicast and ipv6 nat source next up..

Turgon

Unfortunately IOS version has prevented me putting the necessary interfaces into OSPFv3. So I have had to abandon the OSPF v3 configuration. Instead I have used RIPng. The OSPFv3 solutions make a good deal of sense. RIPng seems to be providing reachability thanks to looking it up in Doyle Volume I second edition. Interestingly neither Doyle Vol I or II have examples of IPv6 and OSPF.


The 'form' of OSPFv3 is very similar to OSPF with IPv4. Advertise a loopback interface as an external LSA by redistribute connected. Use a route map to select the loopback and an ipv6 access-list. Put interfaces into ospf using ipv6 ospf1 area 45 for example. You have similar problems with OSPFv3 as OSPF v2 i.e virtual link, DR election. Here's an example of advertising a network as a single entry in the routing table..we can see that area range can be used like with OSPF v2

area 888 range 2020:100:100:2200::/58

A shame I can't configure this with my equipment. Nevertheless I seem to understand the solutions. I will press on now and attempt to get the BGP section working with RIPng instead of OSPFv3 running.

Turgon

England - Saturday morning 8:30am.

About to return to the home rack to press on with the BGP section in the IPv6 lab. I have scheduled a remote rack session for this afternoon so I can use the latest IOS and configure the OSPFv3 sections.

Once this lab is complete I will be very close to reaching my first study milestone which is getting to Camp 1 on the CCIE climb. I have a couple of IPExpert technology labs to finish as well as a couple of Solie switching labs to get there. Im very satisfied about this. I started the first lab on the 10th June 2007 and have made steady regular progress since then. I have even completed a few of the multiprotocol labs along the way to get a taste for the bigger stuff. I always felt this would be the most important part of my preparation the foundation six months and I feel vindicated to take six months out doing this work properly. It's been very hard work at times but really satisfying to get to this point in my studies because looking back had I tried to compress so much work into a shorter timeframe I really don't think I would have understood as much. Rushed labs do not make CCIE's. You need to give your brain not only time to engage with a lab session, but also time to reflect and reading time. Aside from lab hours 200+ I have put in a lot of time on groupstudy researching my books and DocCD to try and help answer technical questions. I have also read about numerous things in my Cisco Press books over the last 9 months and done numerous end of chapter exercises from Doyle.

The patience has really paid off.

I have learned a lot along the way and it's put me in a position where I have something really good to work with in terms of knowhow and experience for the remainder of my preparations. From this point I can start to concentrate on fine tuning and deeper understanding as I work towards completing multiprotocol labs in faster times and with less recourse to DocC, books or the actual solutions themselves.

silentc1015

I really admire your dedication, and this thread is going to be a great resource for all future CCIE candidates!

Turgon

silentc1015 wrote:

I really admire your dedication, and this thread is going to be a great resource for all future CCIE candidates!

Thanks a lot silentc1015. I sure hope so!