Lab Date!

In between Cisco looking at my case I kept checking the lab date scheduler and a suitable date popped up. November 14th, which is exactly 3 weeks after the bootcamp.  Excellent.

Weekend stuffs

Another successful weekend of doing absolutely nothing but study. Friday after work I gained access to some 3560 switches that I’m allowed to use for a month or two. I went through some foreign concepts like DHCP snooping, IP source verification, dynamic arp inspection, and port security.

Yesterday I tackled IE’s VolumeII Lab 7 for the second time. Based on some comments made numerous times by Brian Dennis, he reccomends on the lead up to your exam start doing lab’s 1,7,8,9,10,11 over and over again. Since I redid number 1 about a month back, number 7 was next off the rank with a difficulty rating of 9.

Even though it was quite a while ago, I could still vaguely remember what I screwed up and what I had to look out for. On the first pass I ran out of time and failed on about 13 questions. This time I finished in 6 hours and 45 minutes getting all but 4 questions right. Redistribution was still an absolute nightmare and I think I may have wasted 30 – 40 minutes on it. In the end I just removed some of the two way and moved on…heh should have just done that to begin with!

Today I was planning to do number 8 but as soon as I checked my email to find that IE released the IP services beta v5.0, I adjusted my schedule. Out of the 54 or so tasks planned for the final release this had about 36 of them which I managed to complete in the afternoon. The DHCP and NAT sections are pretty comprehensive and I learnt quite a few things that I just couldn’t understand when reading the on-line documentation.

This coming week is my last for this contract and it may only consist of a couple of days. Following that I’ll maybe do another lab or two, and then get plenty of sleep for next weeks onslaught (IE’s bootcamp).

The “new and improved” lab scheduling policy….

My lab date was originally booked a day after my written exam in April for the 11th of December in Brussels. I hadn’t paid at that point.

About a month ago I pondered the fact that my lab date was possibly too far away after the IE 12 day bootcamp. So I decided to get my friend to check for lab dates and see if there was one about 3 weeks out from the IE bootcamp finishing. There were plenty…

Once Cisco decided to bring in this new lab scheduling policy there were a lot of questions raised about changing dates, paying, not paying, etc that no one seemed to know. So I decided to call Cisco and just confirm that if I decided to change my lab based on how I went at the bootcamp, would there be any penalty? After 1 hour on the phone with them, to put simply, ‘no’ was the answer. Good I thought.

While labbing away a about a month ago, I get an email saying that my lab date was dropped because I hadn’t paid due to it being within the 3 month period. But I was specifically told that because I booked ages ago my lab date wouldn’t drop unless it was within the 1 MONTH DATE. Awesome.

This may not seem to be too big of a problem if you have $1250 US dollars laying around, but at the time I didn’t, and two weeks later when I did, there were no dates available until January 6th 2009….

Luckily I was scouring the IEOC forums and someone was offering their lab date because of visa issues. This one was for the 26th of November, perfect! I quickly dropped him and line and asked that he hold it for me.

Today we were all set so I could grab the date once he dropped it, but as soon as he went to, he got an error telling him that he needs to call Cisco before it can be released. Nothing is ever fucking easy, is it?!?! So I decided to do all the ground work and call Cisco to sort this shit out.

We ended up raising a case, giving Cisco all the details, and my lab date is currently in limbo at the whim of Cisco cert support.

What I don’t get is, why the hell was my lab date dropped and he still had his?? We were both within the three month period, and we both hadn’t paid. Doesn’t sound like any sort of consistant policy to me.

The whole thing is fucked, if I dont get a lab date around the end of November, I’m gonna have to spend a heap more money to fly somewhere else for my exam. I simply cant risk getting closer to the date hoping that something comes up; and I cant wait until next year to sit it. I sincerely hope Cisco come through with the goods.

So…..current lab date and location = UNKNOWN. Bah!

New York

New york was absolutely fantastic. I already have plans to go back, but next time it wont be for business. Didn’t really get to do a lot of sight seeing since most days I was working, and when I wasn’t, I simply couldn’t be bothered. But we did go out to restaurants and bars every night which beats sight seeing anyway!

The project was a success, but it wasn’t without dramas around every corner. All I have to say is that a rather large telco starting with ‘V’ have a bunch of people working for them who couldn’t give two shits about commitment dates and their customers.

So I’m now back in London sporting a decent case the flu that I think developed due to eating poorly, drinking every day, and not getting enough sleep. It’s kinda shit, but I’d rather be sick now than in a week and a half when my 12 day bootcamp with IE starts. I seriously can’t wait!

Tomorrow I’m hitting the study and will do for most of the weekend aswell. IE and IPexpert are both running vLectures on CBAC and Security for the R&S lab which should prove to be most helpful. I might do some labbing but depends how I feel.

IE – Mock Lab 1

I’ve finally found some time to go through and dissect my mock labs. I’ll start with lab 1, cos that would make sense…

Difficulty 6, Score 73

Section	Score	Max
1. Frame Relay	7	7
2. HDLC/PPP	2	2
3. Bridging and Switching	11	16
4. Interior Gateway Routing	23	23
5. Exterior Gateway Routing	5	16
6. IP Multicast	3	6
7. IPv6	5	5
8. QoS	6	6
9. Security	2	5
10. System Management	3	8
11. IP Services	6	6

Not what I was expecting, but by no means disheartening. I’d say my approach was a bit sloppy, and it certainly gave me a good taste of how thorough I need to be in the lab.

Bridging & Switching
3.1 – Staring off I created the wrong IP address on Vlan7, I configured it for rack 1 when it should have been rack 10.
3.4 – In the trunking section, I didn’t configure VLAN6. This baffled me a bit because I always check reachability to all devices on each segment.

BGP
5.1 - No prefixes were installed into SW2’s routing table. No sure what went on here…
5.2 – R6’s interface was unreachable because I screwed up task 3.4
5.3 – SW1’s interface was unreachable because I screwed up task 3.1

Multicast
6.1 – I honestly had no idea how to approach this task, as simple as it was. Multicast is a deffinately a weaker area for me. Since both mock labs I’ve managed to read the majority of my ‘Developing IP multicast’ book and I think further attempts will be muc more understood.

Security
9.1 – For some reason I thought this was a typo. I did for a second think VLAN Acl’s were the answer, but then I had this idea that because SW3 wasn’t in the diagram, it wasn’t part of these questions. It was silly to think that a typo would be in these labs in the first place….

System Management
10.1 – R6 didn’t have a route to the NMS, so although my configuration was right….it wouldn’t have actually worked.
10.2 – R6 didn’t have a route to the NTP server and hence it wasn’t synced.

I’m absolutely livid about the VLAN mistakes, they cost me my BGP section. But on the other hand getting the IP address wrong was probably the most important lesson from the whole lab. If you assign the wrong IP to and interface and then copy the interface IP’s for the TCL script, you will never see the problem in the first place.

Propper study.

So I’m pissing off to New York for 8 days on Monday for work, and the thought crossed my mind that since I’ve never been, I’ll be all but interested in reading text books at the hotel…

My work week at the moment is only 4 days, with Friday being my day off. Ideally If I could get three labs done in three days with some reading I’d be pretty happy.

Friday morning I got up at 9, had breakfast, and started on IE Volume II Lab 18. For all three labs I took the exact same approach, spending more time on each task to be confident enough that the solution I had was the right one and then just note how long I had left left once i’d fionished all the tasks.

IE Vol II – Lab18
Difficulty 7

4.1 – I broke the task by not paying attention to the wording, using 0.0.0.0 on one of the routers when it should have been more specific.
5.4 – Didn’t know how to do this task and meet the requirements. Eventually I just gave up, got connectivity and moved on.
6.4 – Didn’t filter correctly, my method was to use the autorp keyword with multicast boundary when it shoul dhave been using an acl.
7.2 – IPv6 NAT-PT, never read up on this before  and found the DocCD a little hard to understand. Still got some work to do with IPv6.
9.2 – I always get passive and active FTP mixed up, its the only part of this one I couldn’t get right. After the lab I read up on both and think i’ve finally got it nutted.
10.1 – I turned on “logging count” for this task to track if changes were made on the syslog server. This was in fact the answer to 10.2. The command I was after was “service sequence-numbers”.
11.1 – Had the commands right but it didn’t occur to me that I needed to put the domain on the end of each hostname.
11.2 – This was a 4 point task to show off to your ‘colleagues’ how you can make a router always reply to traceroutes from its loopback interface. Thought I had it right, and it actually worked from one router, but not any of others. Regardless, I didnt worry too much about it since its more of a “stupid router trick” (TM Brian Dennis).

—–

Saturday and today I decided to do IE Mock Lab 1 and 2. I’ll post about these when I receive the results, but from looking at the solution guide for lab 1 it would appear I got most of it right (although the score report could say otherwise!). Lab two is still running, but I’ve finished with configuration.

I completed Lab1 in 6hrs, and Lab2 in 6hrs 30 minutes.

Some labbing and a smack in the teeth….

Today I decided to hop back into a bit of labing with one of IE’s core volume III labs. I’ve done up to number 4 so far so it seemed logical to go ahead with number 5.

I’ve never had so many problems!

It started with the switching section. First up I couldn’t ping between the two switches (SW3 & SW4) because I wasnt paying attention to the behind the scenes configuration which needed to be done on SW2. I still got the section done under the allotted time but its a reminder that I need to pay more attention to the diagrams, and the physical topology.

Next was the PPP configuration with Dialer profiles. I’ve done heaps if DDR before back at my old job but not with point-to-point serial. Initially I got them dialing each other and had ping working but then the dialer’s dropped due to idle, after that although both ends came back up, nothing worked. I spent probably half an hour stuffing around with this and in the end just got rid of it and just did it the easy way. The IE forums had a few posts on others having the same issue….and most of them didnt seem to get it working properly.

With L2 out of the way I moved on to the IGP which in itself pretty straight forward except for a couple of areas that weren’t attached to the backbone. One of them required a tunnel because it was a stub area, not too hard….and the others were virtual links. Next up I went through redistribution, I begun testing connectivity…..this is where the real problems started.

Problem 1:
R5 is the hub and R1 / R2 are spokes. because R1 was in area 0 I set up a virtual link directly to R5 and a virtual link directly to R2. Although this looks right in the routing table it was purely and utterly wrong. R2’s virtual link was passing through R5 before it terminates to R1. This was causing traffic to hit R5 and then not be routed in the corect direction even though the routing table had the right next hop. To fix it, the virtual links went from R1 -> R5 -> R2 -> Then the tunnel to SW1.

All good right? No.

Problem 2:
R1 still couldn’t ping R2’s loopback. I cleared processes, double checked my config, went though the routing table, checked the OSPF database, and rang packet debugs for ping tests. It was all rather strange. So bugger it….I’ll move on and check my redistribution and come back to it…..Silly move really….

Problem 3:
Routers in the OSPF domain couldn’t ping R4’s Serial PPP interface, R5’s Serial PPP interface, and R4′ Ethernet interface. Yet it could ping SW2’s interface which was attached to R4’s Ethernet interface!! Once again I checked and checked and checked…..nothing.

By this time I was getting well pissed off. Then I thought….maybe I’ll just try a reboot.

Problem 1, problem 2, and problem 3…..all fixed in 2 minutes. I don’t know what the cause was….IOS related, Dynamips being a pig, or just me making too many changes. But either way it was a very valuable lesson which I hopefully wont fall for again.

BGP was next and it was pretty easy. Phew.

Overall I dropped 3 points on the Dialer profiles, but the lab took a lot longer than what it should have.

This is the first one I’ve done for a while and I certainly wasn’t on the ball as what I have been in the past. Tomorrow I think I’ll do Volume II lab 16, and hopefully with the ordeal I went through today it will keep me on my toes for tomorrow….

Plodding away….

Over the weekend I booked in some rack time and went through the Volume I version 5 bridging and switching labs. Since I have been reading a fair chunk of the 3550/3560 documentation recently I was able to get though almost all the tasks without having to reference it. RSPAN required a quick lookup, but apart from that most of the tasks are pretty straight forward. I have noticed however that MST can get a lot more complicated than what is in the workbook. Whether or not the actual lab even goes into this kind of complexity, I’m going to spend more time on learning this just to be sure. But hopefully a lot of my knowledge gaps can be cleared up in the IE bootcamp.

On top the switching, I finished watching the OSPF videos from week one of the CoD and got halfway through BGP. Again, pretty much everything I saw was what I learnt from the first sitting. Week one does certainly start from the ground up basics so maybe week two will be where I missed a lot of material.

Now that I’ve started my new job (which is only til mid October), I’m somewhat concerned about how much study will get done during the week. I’m hoping that four day weeks will be the answer, but even after just one day, it was noticeably harder to come home and hop straight into it. Maybe I just forget whats its like to start a new job, after all it has been a while…

Success!

Had my interview today and walked away with a job starting next Tuesday. Basically I’m doing technical project management for an investment bank who’s primarily based in London. Essentially they are moving branch locations in the US, and at the same time taking the opportunity to upgrade their routers, switches, firewalls, and phone system to Cisco kit.

It’s four days a week until mid October which fits perfectly in with the IE bootcamp that starts the following Monday. After that its 6 – 7 weeks of seriously long days packed full of labs, reading, and review….

Apart from that I just plodded through some more of the 3550/3560 documentation. I tried to watch some class-on-demand videos but the the IE site was running pretty slow and had to give it a miss.

This weekend I’ll probably do a fair bit of study now that I wont have as much time during the week. I was also thinking of doing a mock lab on Monday but our street is currently having the underground water pipes replaced and jackhammers outside your window don’t really help when you need to concentrate….

Study, and the job front….

Went through day 2 of the class-on-demand videos today but didn’t really come across anything new (which is definitely a good thing). On top of that I started reading through the documentation for the 3550/3560 switches and started making some notes in the same way i’ve been doing for the routing documentation. Its actually a pretty good doc, everything is under its own category making it easy to find, and its not as lengthy as I originally thought.

Also had a breakthrough with the employment side of things today. I’ve got an interview tomorrow at a bank in the city. Fingers crossed, it sounds like it could be good.