I Just Don't Feel Like It!!!

I do not feel like studying lately. Last year I got a heck of a lot of studying done over Christmas, New Year's, and the following weekends. But this year I just don't seem to have the energy. I'm working a lot more hours these days and my son is a year older. I'm not sure how much all of that has to do with it. Last year I was still going to grad school, so I would think I'd have more energy this year.

It's not a feeling of being overwhelmed--I actually feel like I'm somewhat close. Maybe that's part of the problem. The fear and accompanying adrenalin hasn't hit yet.

Interestingly, a lot of the other CCIE blogs seem to be pretty quite the last few weeks. I'm probably not the only one having a hard time getting motivated right now.

I'm gonna force myself to go through a multicast lab or two to at least get something done.

IE Vol 2 Lab 1 Wrap-up

Some thoughts on this lab:

Layer 2:
Everything but Cell Mode MPLS was simple. I would expect switching and frame-relay to be MUCH simpler than what was on the R&S lab.
Regarding Cell Mode, this was literally the first time I touched it. I realized quickly I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.
Next step: Watch the CoD

IGP:
This section was simple as well. Not much to single area OSPF.
Next step: Read the message board to see why point-to-multipoint non-broadcast was used instead of non-broadcast

EGP:
Everything was straightforward here until task 3.4, bestpath selection. I did put some time into this and couldn't figure it out. I'm looking at the solution and I'm not sure about it.
Next step: Lab this up in dynamips.

MPLS:
I skipped TE mostly because it was only 3 points and a lot of work for those 3 points.
Next step: Redo a Vol 1 TE lab as penance.

VPN:
The Internet Access task was the first time I did route leaking. But I understood the theory enough to get this working relatively easily. The key is the destination interface and the ip must both be stated on a multipoint interface in the static route.

This was the first time I've configured VRF NAT. I almost had it, but debugs were complaining about host unreachable. Turned out I completely missed the route-target import so I didn't have a route back to the source. If I were more confident in NAT I would have continued troubleshooting--it was certainly solvable if I wasn't so "sure" it was a NAT issue.

Next step: Watch NAT CoD

IP Multicast:
I apparently did a pretty big brain dump on Multicast.

Next step:
Do Vol 1 Multicast labs

QoS: Skipped
Next step: Do Vol1 QoS lab

Security: Skipped
Next step: Review tasks, research doccd for anything that's not obvious

System Management: Skipped
Next step: Review tasks, research doccd for anything that's not obvious

All in all, I am pretty please with the way this went. It was a HECK of a lot better than my first ever R&S full lab. A few takeaways but nothing extravagant. Once I complete the next steps I'll move on to lab 2, but may come back to repeat this one later.

Final Score: 55/100

IE Vol 2 Lab 1

7:00am Lab Started
7:30am Diagrams and read-through complete
7:55am 1.1 complete, 3 points
8:01am 1.2 compete, 3 points (switchport protected)
8:08am 1.3 complete, 2 points
8:13am 1.4 complete, 2 points
8:17am 1.5 complete, 2 points
9:10am 1.6 complete, 0 points (cell mode mpls, had to cheat)

9:27am 2.1 complete, 3 points
9:34am 2.2 complete, 2 points
9:46am 2.3 complete, 3 points (assuming non-broadcast)

10:02 am 3.1 complete, 3 points
10:11am 3.2 complete, 3 points
10:26am 3.3 complete, 3 points
10:47am skipping 3.4 until mpls is complete, 0 points

11:02am 4.1 complete, 3 points
11:03am 4.2 complete, 3 points
11:05am 4.3 complete, 3 points

**BREAK***

1:49pm back from break

skipping 4.4 MPLS TE

1:57 5.1 complete, 3 points
2:06 5.2 complete, 3 points
2:14 5.3 complete, 3 points
2:39 5.4 complete, 3 points
3:23 5.5 complete, 0 points (cheated)
3:32 5.6 complete, 3 points
3:42 5.7 complete, 2 points

That's it. My energy is gone so I'm calling it a day.

IE Vol 1: MPLS TE Unequal Cost Load Balancing Complete

This time, we create two tunnels. One uses explicit paths, the other uses dynamic paths. Setting the traffic-eng bandwidth different on each tunnel causes unequal-cost load-balancing to occur.

One troubleshooting note, there are three requirements to have the TE tunnels show in the routing table:

• tunnel mpls traffic-eng autoroute announce must be configured on each tunnel
• the TE tunnels must show up/up in sh mpls traf tun brie
  
• the TE tunnels must have ip unnumbered or an IP address assigned

Not having an IP unnumbered assigned to the tunnel interfaces caused me a lot of grief. Everything showed up and functioning, but I didn't see the tunnels in the routing table. Once I added ip unnumbered loo0, everything looked great. Note the traffic share counts that are different between the two paths. Try doing that in OSPF without MPLS-TE!

R4#sh ip route 150.1.3.3
Routing entry for 150.1.3.3/32
Known via "ospf 1", distance 110, metric 5, type intra area
Routing Descriptor Blocks:
* directly connected, via Tunnel0
Route metric is 5, traffic share count is 2
directly connected, via Tunnel1
Route metric is 5, traffic share count is 1

IE Vol 1: MPLS TE Explicit PE-PE Tunnels Complete

This is the same as the last lab, but instead of dynamic tunnels, explicit tunnels are used.

To do this, an ip explicit path list needs to be created, which lists each ingress interface on each router in the path.

When I set it up, I used one of the wrong IPs. The nice part was the sh mpls tra tun told me which was incorrect:

Last Error: PCALC:: Explicit path has unknown address, 150.1.45.4

MPLS Traffic Engineering: PE to PE Tunnels Complete

I must confess, I made it thorough all the written exams so far without touching Traffic Engineering. I knew a tiny bit of theory, such as it relied on RSVP and inserted yet another label on the stack, but that was about it.

This first TE lab was a pretty good introduction. This link describes the configuration process really well.

In a nutshell, a tunnel interface needs to be created on the two endpoints. The tunnel gets configured as mode mpls traffic-eng, along with a bunch of other options under the tunnel interface.

Then, the mpls network needs to be configured to support this tunnel. This is accomplished through the monotonous configuration, on each router, of:

• enabling mpls traffic engineering globally
• enabling mpls traffic engineering on each interface between the tunnel endpoints
• configuring ip rsvp bandwidth on each interface between the tunnel endpoints
• configuring ospf (or isis) for traffic engineering on each mpls router

It seems if you miss a link in the path, little info is given as to which one you've missed. Instead, all you get is a message saying that the path isn't valid when you do a show mpls tra tun. Once all the links have been completed, the tunnel interface comes up/up.

IE Vol 1 Controlling MPLS label distribution Complete

Nothing fancy here, the lab just has you only send MPLS labels for the BGP endpoints. Those two are the only IPs required for the vpn labels to have igp labels to ride. So getting rid of all the extraneous lables has no effect on the vpn functionality.