IE SP Vol 2 Lab 3 Task 6

Ok, this multicast task was a bit rediculous too. Now on the bright side I was pretty much able to nail the config. But when I got down to the test, I was not able to get it to work at all. I went through the solutions guide and primarily found one mistake--that I didn't have the mdt router's loopback interfaces running pim. Even upon fixing this, however, the multicast test still did not work.

-----12 hours later-----

I was really starting to get desperate here, but I FINALLY got everything figured out. It basically boiled down to two things:

1. sparse-mode requires autorp listener for the autorp groups to be able to pass through. Without it, autorp will not function across sparse-mode interfaces.

2. On mVPN, rp's are required for both the main routing instance and the vrf. This was my main mistake. I was missing a static rp on a vrf interface.

So, after a long time of being worried I had no idea what I was doing and that this stuff was way over my head, it turned out to be silly mistakes that did me in.

As with other topics I spent so much time on troubleshooting an issue, I really hope all this time put in helps me the next time I come across mVPN. I'm feeling pretty good about it now, but we'll see how it goes next week.

If multicast contines to be this complex, I may need to draw a mVPN diagram in order to keep all the tunnels and vrf's straight.

IE Vol 2 SP Lab 3 Task 5

5.1 Complete, no issues
5.2 Complete, no issues
5.3 Complete, no issues
5.4 Wow, what a task. I now see why this lab gets an 8. For 2 bullet points, there is a heck of a lot of assumptions that have to be made, tons of redistribution, and a bunch of vrfs to keep track of. I actually made my way through this pretty well, but it certainly took some time. An excellent exercise to validate understanding of the big picture.
5.5, piece of cake after making it through the last task.

IE Vol 2 SP Lab 3

Here we go with lab 3, right on schedule. Again, I'll be spending a full week on this one, taking my time to research and experiment with anything I'm not confident on. This lab moves up to a difficulty rating of 8, so I'm assuming there will be some curve balls thrown in this time.

1.1 Complete, no issues
1.2 Complete, even in transparent mode, dynamips doesn't seem to allow extended vlans on the ethernet modules.
1.3 Complete, no issues
1.4 Complete, no issues
1.5 Complete, had to change the label protocol to tdp.

2.1 Complete, no issues--no DR? use p2p or p2mp
2.2 Complete, no issues--no area authen? put it on the interface
2.3 Complete, stupid mistake. I couldn't get the isis adjacency up across the frame-relay interface. I thought there may have been some trick here since the frame-relay map had to support clns. Turns out I missed configuring isis on the interface to begin with. A dumb mistake that would have cost me valuable time in the lab.
2.4 Wrong. I used the isis password command. However, this exchanges the passwords in plain text. To do md5, an authentication key-chain must be used ala rip and eigrp.

3.1 complete, no issues
3.2 complete, no issues
3.3 complete, no issues. I'm probably splitting hairs a bit here, but the maximum prefix drops the connection when the limit is exceeded. Since the requirements specify that if the table "continues to grow to 12,000", to me this means at 12,000 the connection should be reset, meaning maximum-prefixes is 11,999. I'd hope the lab wouldn't be quite this particular, but who knows.

4.1 Complete, no issues. Here's where the tdp requirement from earlier gets specified.
4.2 Complete, no issues.

Well so far this lab is laughable. I'm assuming it's gonna it rough here shortly, because the difficulty is nowhere near an 8 so far.

IE Vol2 Lab 2 Complete

Well, I'm on schedule, barely, and ready to do lab 3 next week. There really wasn't anything too substantially scary in this lab. The VPN config was pretty basic and there wasn't any TE. PPPoE was new, but I felt pretty comfortable with it and know how to get to the docs. I'm also getting more comfortable with MPLS QoS. So, aside from a few knobs I think I did ok.

IE Vol 2 Section 10 Complete

10.1 Gotta love those knobs. mpls ldp tcp pak-priority. Now I never would have found this one. Guess I gotta get better at looking over the command-line options.

10.2 Pretty basic netflow setup. I'm not sure if netflow was covered in R&S, but I've worked with it enough where it wasn't an issue.

IE Vol 2 Section 9 Complete

9.1 Complete, no issues--just like R&S
9.2 Complete, no issues--just like R&S
9.3 Complete, no issues--just like R&S

IE Vol 2 Section 8

8.1 Complete. No issues, standard R&S stuff here. The nice part about logging denies, is I find out quickly that ospf has to be permitted in the access list.

8.2 Complete. Maximum routes in the vrf controls the size of the routing table.