UniverCD going away

Internetwork Expert has it here:

http://blog.internetworkexpert.com/2008/08/25/documentation-cd-update-for-the-ccie-lab/

I am thinking this is probably a good thing, because I have always found navigating the DocCD troublesome.

CCIE Written Strategy

I started a couple months ago with reading v3 of the exam certification guide and am currently on the multicast routing protocol section.

I have been taking detailed notes wherever there are “Key Topics” presented, or for any particular section that I find confusing.

A few weeks ago I got permission to purchase the Narbik soup-to-nuts lab book and have just started labs 1 and 2 since getting the book last week.

Does anyone think that doing the lab scenarios at the same time I’m studying for the written exam is a bad idea?  If so, why?  If not, why not?

-Networkingmarmot

Narbik’s Soup-to-Nuts Switching Lab 2

After work this evening, I decided to give Narbik’s STN switching lab 2 a go.  I did a little better on this one than the previous.  I have learned one thing though:

Learn how to navigate the DocCD.

Knowing where to go saved me a lot of time, and there were just a couple tasks that I didn’t know how to make work immediately:

Task 6 asked the engineer to configure the switches so that flooded traffic is restricted to the trunk links needed to get to the end device.  For some reason, I thought that this was talking about unknown unicast/multicast/broadcast suppression on all non-trunk links.  What this really was talking about was VTP Pruning.  Oops.

Task 7 would have been easy if I would have remembered the Smartports macro to configure access ports default with portfast and bpdufilter.  I looked around on the DocCD for this one and didn’t find it.

Task 8 is an MSTP configuration.  MSTP rules.  In my mind there is no real reason to have a spanning-tree for each VLAN in your network, it’s just a bunch of unnecessary protocol communication happening.  I think a far cleaner setup would be to set up a spanning-tree for each redundant interface.  PVST & Rapid-PVST I think people often default to because it’s “easy”.

Task 11 I had configured properly, but used the sticky MAC way of doing port security.

Task 12 in particular I forgot that “protect” didn’t send a notification, but “restrict” did.

Task 15 involved setting up a VLAN access map and then using that access map to filter within a particular VLAN.  I had to look at the DocCD for this one, since it’s something I haven’t done before, but it’s a pretty cool feature – might be worth doing on something like a day 0 worm/virus attack within a VLAN.

Yes I know there are better ways of doing this, but I like to know what tools are available to me in an emergency.

I think the hardest time I will have with doing the labs is OVERTHINKING THE PROBLEM. When I look at an individual task, I immediately start thinking of solutions without going over the whole thing (and how it affects other tasks).  Which brings me to another point:

READ THE ENTIRE LAB BEFORE GOING INTO CONFIG MODE.

The labs (Narbik’s) seem to be written in such a way that each task isn’t necessarily configured in the chronological order that it is presented in the PDF.  You need to read all of the tasks, find out what needs to be done first before doing something else, and then what I do is write out my own list of tasks in the true chronological order that they need to be done.

Narbik’s Soup-to-Nuts Switching Lab 1

I started Narbik Kocharians‘ soup-to-nuts R/S Lab e-book today.  Lab 1 consists of a basic set of LAN switching tasks using 3550 or 3650 hardware.

I glanced through the material and assumed that I would probably be able to complete this starting lab without any DocCD research at all.

I was wrong.  (Queue up the Price-is-Right FAIL music)

There are 17 tasks, and I was able to complete about 14 of them without any trouble at all and was able to verify my configuration was correct up to that point.

Here’s where I had trouble:

Task 11 was asking about “keeping track” of all MAC addresses learned by a certain port and sending the info to an NMS.  I could have been overthinking this one, as I wasn’t sure what was being asked.

Task 12 caught me off guard as I was not able to recall how to do any of the Macro’s or create my own.  Kind of a cool feature, I suspect I will be spending a little more time learning this one and perhaps applying it to my own network.

Task 14 make me think “private VLAN” configuration right away – but that was wrong.  Not sure why this particular task was worded the way it was, pretty sure that’s what threw me off, or I could have been overthinking the problem, which isn’t that uncommon for me!]

Overall I like this workbook – I hope that it will help close my knowledge gap between now and when I end up taking one of Narbik’s bootcamps.  I haven’t taken my written exam yet, but I have a pretty good study schedule laid out to have it completed by the end of November.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who decided for or against doing lab scenarios while you were still preparing for the written exam – not sure if this is the smartest path, but on the surface it seems to make sense.

–NetworkingMarmot