Well per my last post, from like 8 months ago or so... still need to work on the CCDE and JNCIE. Though, since then I did pass the CCIE Service Provider lab.
Dual CCIE! W00T!
Plus I am doing a lot more actual programming at work around the various APIs available to us with the tools we us to manage our network. This way we can automate some things and reduce the amount of MAC work we have.
I'd like to work in a place that does more engineering, more automation... Right now its less engineering and more tediousness.
I'm working towards the JNCIE, and at the same time preparing for the CCDE written. Thats a shitload of stuff to remember. I have to recertify my CCIE, but I really do need to get that JNCIE now.
Tonight, though.. I drank wine and watched brainless television.
So I'm pushing the idea of using VRFs to separate customer networks from our core infrastructure at work. At the moment we actually fold our customer's networks into our address domain and route all of their disparate networks in our core.
Yeah. Thats stupid. The end result is we push all kinds of complexity (read: bullshit) into the customer's network.
Anyway, I made some progress today as people come around to it. I work with some smart people. I'm fortunate. Very few Type-As (alpha-male ass-holes) in my current job...
So I'm digging "headless man" Amber ale right now. Brewed by Tyranena Brewing in Lake Mills, WI.
Give it a go. Brewed in the Altbier style. When I lived in Germany, I had a few of those at a german steakhouse.
Each of the 5 PCs has 4 ethernet ports in them. I bought them to be routers running the Vyatta open-source router OS. Right now each of them is partitioned with Debian 3.1r5 on one partition and Vyatta on the other. I have Nagios, OpenSWAN, and mySQL running one various of these boxes.
For a while I was geeking out on writing voice applications in VoiceXML. I was writing them with Eclipse's voice tools package, then saving them to an Apache directory. I used Dynamic DNS and punched in the URL in Tellme Studio. Then just call the Tellme developer 1-800 line and playback your VXML script! I wrote a voice mail app that recorded a message and then pushed the binary to the SQL server. You could call in after that and review the messages you left. Stupid, I know. But you can write that stuff in VoiceXML in a day or two.
The boxes are no big deal, but I'll be upgrading them this year. 3.8ghz HT/EE processors and 2GB of RAM each. That is plenty o' power for linux.
The router I am happy with I managed to get it maxed out with RAM and flash plus an encryption module. I'll be landing a few more of those in the next couple of months, including a 3640. Cisco EOL'd these boxes, but they run 12.3 mainline. The 3640 runs 12.4 mainline.
The KVM does the job.
The ACER laptop (on the workbench) is just Windows XP. I'll be putting a 64-bit linux OS on there soon enough. The other laptop has Debian on it now.
As you can see I am a little ADD with my interests. I need to focus for the time being on the second CCIE. I can get pretty easily distracted... for hours... digging through source code on the linux box. I don't have that kind of time to waste these days with family and all so I mostly try to just learn shit like iptables or I configure the Vyatta routers in different scenarios. I had the bright idea of writing a book about Vyatta, which I want to do so badly. I hammered out about 30 pages and then moved 1000 miles and started a new job and bought a house. So "time crunch" is an understatement.
So I went to the Milwaukee art museum today to see the work of Francis Bacon from the '50s. Screaming people with hazy eyes. Creepy. Disturbing. Then I wandered around the permanent collections and found myself in a corner of German or Dutch artists doing medieval- looking scenes of everday life in European villages. Very colorful, and in some cases almost photo-realistic. I like these paintings very much.
I like Milwaukee.
Then I bought "The C Programming Language" 2nd Ed. Classic book. Read the chapter on pointers and arrays. Ahhh.... I'm a nerd. Now for Guiness and pizza.
I really don't have a lab that I use for CCIE prep. My lab is actually nothing more than a 2610 w/VPN module, a d-link L3 switch, and 5 PCs with linux loaded on them. Debian 3.1 to be specific. I just start loading 3.1r5 on all of them.
Each PC has all its PCI slots filled with ethernet NICs. The reason for this is so I can turn them into routers with one totally kick-ass open-source package called... Vyatta.
Ok, so it's now 2007. Which means I haven't posted to this journal in over 18 months.
Awesome.
I passed my CCIE lab back in Jan of 06. So now I'm ramping up for the Service Provider track so I can be dual CCIE'd.
Plus its my birthday today. I feel like I should post here more often. I'm old. I feel like I should share something. Or participate. I just don't understand where I'll get the time. Family w/kids. Career. Studying. Ugh.
I know, I know. This isn't an exciting LiveJournal. It's only averaging about one post a month. I apologize for that. I have been taking InternetworkExpert's classes on-line and and also doing their Audio Class series.
I do have some interesting notes from the classes.
- Redistribution
What gets redistributed? Well, let us say that we are redistributing from EIGRP into OSPF. The router does not redistribute routes in EIGRP's topology that do not also appear in the routing table. Basically, only EIGRP routes that appear in the current routing table will get redistributed into OSPF. There is an exception to this. Any directly connected interfaces on which EIGRP is enabled also get redistributed. The router does this by essentially issuing a hidden version of the command "redistribute connected" that will only select connected interfaces on which EIGRP is enabled, but not OSPF. This automated "redistribute connected" can be broken by manually issuing the "redistribute connected" command under OSPF. I expect this to happen in the CCIE lab. Now what are the work arounds?
- OSPF next-hop processing in NMBA networks
Normally if an OSPF router has multiple adjacencies in the same IP subnet, a DR/BDR election occurs. Also, routers that receive routes from one neighbor in a subnet do not change the next hop for those routes when passing those routes on to other neighbors in the same IP subnet. This can be a problem in a hub-and-spoke NBMA network. The spokes will learn about the other spokes networks, but the next hop for those networks will be the other spokes themselves and not the hub. This means you must have frame-map statements on every spoke pointing to every other spoke, otherwise those networks will not be reachable. This is the default behavior when the OSPF network type is non-broadcast, which is the default for frame-relay and ATM multipoint interfaces. Also, because a DR/BDR election is occuring you must ensure that no spoke will ever become the DR or BDR, using the "priority 0" command. Then comes along the OSPF network type "point-to-multipoint." This network type was designed just for this scenario. First, there is no DR/BDR election. Second, when the hub receives a route from a spoke, the hub will change the next hop to itself. This eliminates the need for all those frame-map statements on the spokes. Before doing this in the lab, make sure it is allowed! On the lab, they frequently tell you what OSPF network types you can or can not use. Such as "do not use the 'ip ospf network' command'".
Well that's it for now, but I do have a lot more notes...
Well, tomorrow InternetworkExpert will be shipping the lab study guides, and a free mini I-pod. There was a three week delay because they wanted to ship the I-Pod with my guides. Cool.
In the meantime, I have started viewing their class on demand series. Although I have only finished the first day, I can say that this class is pretty great. So far.
As soon as I get my lab guides, I will be buying rack time in bulk and I will start indexing all the ins and outs of frame-relay inverse arp, various ATM things, and other layer 2 stuff.
