Time Time Time or the lack thereof.
My apologies for the huge lack of content lately.
I have been insanely busy with work along with doing lots of labs. Especially IPv6 labs was challenging. I have done 50% of a blog post about my trials with this beast.
The day before yesterday i started on one of my worst enemies, namely Multicasting. Even the very name of it scares me. It shouldnt be like that, so im working on facing my fears.
Also, real life stuff, like car troubles, redoing our living room as well as girlfriend time, takes up valuable study time. I have also set aside some time for physical exercise. This CCIE study means extra pounds/kg’s 🙂
Last night i did labs on BSR and MSDP with anycast. The good thing is that all my theory is solid. There were quite timers and elections i need to remember. Like what RP is choosen based on what priority. Is it the highest or lowest priority?
This differs whether its an election on BSR or an election on which RP to choose. Very confusing.
BSR election: Highest priority, if the same priority, the highest source IP address.
Anycast configuration also went fine. Configured a full mesh of 3 MSDP peers for redundancy purposes. Registration between them takes a little while, but after that SA (Source Active) messages passes through the RP’s just fine.
The RP then pulls the data from the source and can through (*,G) entries pass it to its own multicast-domain’s hosts. After that, when the SPT threshold on the first hop router is exceeded, it automatically joins the (S,G) toward the “real” source.
A quick note is that when you have a router with multiple interfaces participating in the multicast network, they will all send out a ping to the group you specify. This results in multiple trees (S,G) being created.
All in all, some good labs.
Late last night i ordered a few books. I noticed they were being praised on the Packet Pushers podcast.
The first one is a reference book that i heard is a must have, namely TCP/IP Illustrated. The two others are MPLS and VPN Architectures, volume 1 + 2. Those were the ones mentioned on the show.
Looking forward getting my hands on them.
Ill try and finish the IPv6 blog post in the very near future.
Until then, take care!