Captains Log - Destination: CCIE 2012

Plazma

In the year 2012... on a planet far far away... where the trees were made of UTP cables and had lush seas of binary... there existed a treasure that glistened as bright as looking straight into SFP. This treasure shrouded in mystery, only gave a clue by it's 4 letters... CCIE.

Anyway.. I'm making this as a lab diary type thing.. I wasn't going to bother, but I'm tired of having post it notes cover my monitor and keyboards.

Plazma

Finished INE volume 1 this week.. and I'm just barely scratching the surface. Hopefully tomorrow I'll do a quick review and then jump into frame-relay .. it's a small section and I deal with it daily at work.. so hopefully it won't be too bad.

The good:

> I kinda get private vlans now... the configuration was tripping me up this whole time.
> Never done q-in-q before.. it's pretty neat and well explained.
> VTP is evil, but it is kinda nifty.

The not so good:

> STP and all it's infamy
> PPPoE still scares me and confuses me
> failback bridging / IRB is weird and scary

Plazma

Spent the past 4 hours or so drilling and finishing up INE Vol 1 - Section 2 , Frame Relay. Most of it was a review, but a lot of stuff I never touched before.. including FREEK, and IRB

Plazma

Started Volume 1, Section 3... got up to 3.6. Lots of floating static route goodness going on as well as sla objects. At work we have a lot of VOIP failover situations that heavily use ip sla's and similar mechanisms on different vendors. I never wrote the config templates for them, but deployed them. Now I feel like I have a far better understanding of how awesome they are.. and you can even set the ToS on it!

Plazma

Finished Volume 1 - Section 3 today.. but I have a pretty strong feeling I'll be going back to it at least 3 more times.. if anything for OER.

OER is MASSIVE...and pretty nifty.. and complicated.. but naturally to do the job OER does, there isn't any simple metric for that.

Going to do a brief summary / review then go out for a thanksgiving dinner!

Plazma

Passed out on the couch last night to some holiday movies on TV.. regardless ended up waking up early and doing some labbing.

Finished INE Vol 1, Section 4 - RIP

I went into this one thinking it would be a cake walk and take the least amount of time... talk about a kick to the groin! RIP being as simple as it is.. there's still a huge amount you can do with it and that can go wrong. Also apparently I thought I knew distribute lists fairly well.. but that was proven wrong earlier .. I'm set straight now.

The AD distance filtering is cool.. and it's even cooler how you can use route-map's almost like enhanced tracking objects and get clever with null routes.

Plazma

Got up to INE Vol 1 , Section 5 - 5.12

Lot of really cool stuff with filtering and leak-maps .. I gotta go back over those. Summary addresses tripped me up a bit too.
I did surprisingly well on the key chain stuff considering I've not done it much... the key rotation is nifty.. I may see if I can implement that at work or at least suggest it.

I think I'll take a small break now.. come back to part of it later. Would love to finish it up today as tomorrow I'm going to be gone part of the day, but we'll see.

Turgon

Progress is good, keep it up.

Plazma

Got up to 5.22 today .. distribute lists still are a bit confusing but seem to be getting a bit clearer with time. Leak-maps are still kinda murky as well.

Kinda started feeling nervous/overwhelmed toward the end this evening... and letting negative thoughts in.. so I figured it was a good stopping point for the evening. If things go well, I can finish up tomorrow morning before I have to leave for the day.. then it's back to the grind on Monday.

Plazma

I couldn't sleep so I finished up INE Volume 1, Section 5 - EIGRP

> LOOOOTS to review on filtering.. mostly with distribute-lists , leak-maps, route-maps..(well..everything)
> Need to review summarization and floating summarization
> Need to review load sharing and unequal cost load sharing

Plazma

Did a few hours this morning and got up to INE Vol 1 , Section 6.11 in OSPF

> Will need to review COST manipulation and how it affects OSPF routing decisions.. BIIIG TIME

Got to go to a family gathering type thing in a bit.. might night get home to study much.. then it's back to work tomorrow and a normal work week..so I probably wont' get to do but an hour a day.

Plazma

Only had about an hour of study time tonight.. got up to INE Vol I , Section 6.24 in OSPF.

> I feel pretty good about summary addresses.. and it really cleared the confusion I was having.

Plazma

Studied 1 hour before and 1 hour after my workout today.. got up to Section 6.38 on OSPF.. only 10 more to go!

> I feel a lot better about distribute lists and prefix lists than I did now..
> OSPF has far to many moving parts
> I like pie

Plazma

I finished up INE Vol Section 6 - OSPF tonight.. with a bit of time to spare. Probably going to grab a snack and play a video game until I have to get up for work tomorrow.

> Context sensitive help kicks an unlimited amount of ass
> The more I read about it, the more I like OSPF.. it's a bit overwhelming but right at its' core it's a very "no frills" type of protocol.. far less 'magic' masquerading things

ronjazz

You're on fire Plazma!!!! I'm working on the same labs but I have my date set for August 2012. I've been trying to say close to the plan that Petr Lapukhov, 4xCCIE/CCDE in CCIE R&S talked about on his INE blog (How to pass the CCIE R&S with INE's 4.0 Training Program)
Good luck and lets get our numbers in 2012!!!!

Plazma

Started INE Vol 1 Section 7 - BGP tonight. Not a lot of time to study.. maybe an hour or so but I'm about 3/4 away through task 7.1. Getting sleepy.. pick back up tomorrow after work

jamesp1983

You're killing it man. Keep going!

Plazma

Got through INE Vol 1 - Section 7.7 today.

I'm pretty beat from work today.. we've been short handed all week with everyone on vacation. I've got to get up around 7am MST to replace a 5505 with a 5510 at a customer site, then work is having a Christmas party. I didn't want to go but my boss is kinda making me go.

Plazma

Woke up at 7:00am to do a customer maintenance and it went without a hitch, just swapped an asa 5505 with a 5510 w/CSC module. Once that was done I did some errands and continued my studies. Got up to INE Vol 1 - Section 7.13 . I have to leave shortly to go to some work Christmas party. I'm hoping I can sneak out early and come back to nail some more BGP goodness (I'm not much of a crowd/party person).

Since I did the CCIP , the BGP stuff is going by a bit easier for the moment.. very good refreshers on clusters, RR's, confederations..etc.

Plazma

Got back from the Christmas party, brewed a bit of coffee and decided to knock out a few more BGP labs. Got up to INE Vol 1, Section 7.17. I'm hoping tomorrow I can at least get close to halfway done with BGP.

Plazma

Spent the better part of today and this evening mulling through BGP goodness. This is a really large section, and has taken it's toll.. I'm spent for the night. I got up to INE Vol 7 - Ssection 7.36 .. so I hit my goal of getting half way done with the BGP section this week/weekend.

> as-set stuff is really confusing
> I did well on the suppress and unsuppress maps
> BGP is awesome, but it's options are endless.

Plazma

Didn't get a chance to give an update last night.. had to pick up my better half from the airport. I got though INE Vol 1 - Section 7.44

> I did fairly well on it considering how confusing it was
> The only thing that really trips me up is BGP Conditional Route Injection - marked for review

Plazma

Took a break yesterday .. I was pretty much dead to the world after getting < 6 hours of sleep and picking up my better half from the airport that morning. I picked up today and got up to INE Vol 1 - Section 7.58 .. only a few more tomorrow until I finally finish BGP!

> BGP Dampening confuses me probably as much as OER does (if not more)
> Local-as is pretty interesting and also confusing at times.. though I 'get' it at a high level
> as-set still confuses me... can't seem to find a cut and dry explanation for it

reaper81

Good job! BGP is fun What about starting a study counter?

Plazma

Finished up BGP this evening (finally).. I didn't have much left and I could have finished last night, but I was pretty sleepy and wanted to spend some time with my girlfriend. As for what's next.. I believe it's multicast, BUT I might skip and go to MPLS instead since it's pretty hand-in-hand with BGP.

Plazma

Decided to start MPLS today and hopefully have it done by this weekend time permitting.. I've got another xmas party to go to tomorrow night. I tried getting a bit farther, but by the time I started on 14.4 , I started getting too tired and lost my thoughts and got frustrated.. a good sign to stop and come back later. I'll hit it tomorrow and start over on 14.4 .. or I might just re-start the whole thing since I feel like I could have done better the first time around

Plazma

Went back over MPLS since last night was a bit of a wash.. to tired to absorb much. I got a good nights sleep , had some coffee and worked all morning and into early afternoon and got through MPLS. I figured since I just got done with BGP, MPLS would be more of a logical choice as a next step than Multicast, at least for me. I don't use a lot of the fancy stuff it can do at work, but we use a lot of VRF's and OSPF on our CPE's (though that's getting changed to BGP soon.. current CPE routers don't support certain features in VRF's).

> I definitely need to review the pieces to OSPF and EIGRP with MPLS
> Address families make a lot more sense now.. and I'm a bit clearer on what the address-family ipv4 and address-family vpnv4 actually do.. just another piece to the puzzle
> Feeling pretty good but bad thoughts entering my head again.. trying to discourage me..etc.

Plazma

Started Multicast today .. INE Vol 1 Section 8. I got through quite a bit this morning/early afternoon , but then took a long break to spend some time with my better half and do some stuff around the house. I had a spare hour so I decided to run through a few more tasks and am now up to 8.18 (Finished the basic multicast and autorp stuff).

> So far to my surprise, multicast doesn't seem as difficult as I made it out to be
> Going through the tasks, I try my hardest to get the answer on my own and research it.. and with a lot of the multicast stuff, I've gotten mostly right or completely right more than any of the other sections.
> I'm hoping to finish multicast this week and keep trucking along to the next section. I've got another xmas party this Saturday and then I'll leave for nearly 2 weeks to visit family.. good time for an extended break.

Plazma

Chugged away at a bit more multicast tonight.. not a lot of time tonight but managed to get through Section 8.23 .. not that much farther to go on multicast so I should be able to finish it this week.

Plazma

Chugged along the past few days and managed to get through multicast without too much difficulty. I've got plenty to review, especially on the practical side of things. Hopefully I'll have time to start and finish IPv6 this weekend.. or at least before I take a vacation next week.

> High level and theoretical stuff seems fairly simple and straight forward for the most part
> Static mroutes are confusing to me a bit.. Need to really brush up on that
> Will definitely need to review and practice over and over again.. but it's pretty cool what you can do with multicast
> Gotta go over the multicast IP to MAC conversions too

Plazma

Started on INE Vol 1 - Section 9 IPv6 yesterday and today.. got up to 9.11 and will start the rest tomorrow bright and early! For some reason I'm REALLY enjoying myself doing these labs... I feel like I'm starting to kinda grasp a lot of things.. at least with IPv6. I recall in my CCNP days the EUI-64 stuff seemed really confusing.. but now it makes sense. Also probably because configuring RIP and EIGRP are trivial