I have a few minutes this morning that i want to use to clarify a special BGP feature which i had misunderstood until a few days ago. This has to do with the aggregate-address that you use to create a summary address.

Long time since last post. There are reasons for that. First of is labs. Ive been doing quite alot of labs. I finished Narbik’s Vol 1 workbook. All good stuff, and I learned alot of material that was not covered in the written blueprint.

In my continued quest through BGP i ran into a couple of things which i wanted to share my thoughts about. All of them has to do with a non-direct peering between BGP peers. Originally the BGP protocol was designed to be run between directly connected routers.

Lately I have been having a motivational down-period. I was doing alot of labs all evening/night and I was burned out. So I have been enjoying easter with family and girlfriend. It has been very nice. However, im starting to feel the urge of going back to the labs again which is good.

Im learning something new at work almost every day. We do alot of voice installations, some directly for the customer, others we host. Voice has always been a strange world to me, and it still is. Basically it boils down to the fact that it doesnt interest me what so ever.

I want to point your attention to a great article right here: ardenpackeer.com, good stuff, deffinately worth the read. I am looking this up today, as i ran into it last night doing more BGP labs. Again, just to re-iterate. The feature gives you the ability of taking a network, thats advertised by a certain source, and inject a more specific route of this network into the BGP table (and then to the routing table).

I wanted to share a very interesting tidbit i figured out the hard way. Again, its about NSSA areas in OSPF. When redistributing a route into an NSSA area, how is the forwarding address chosen? Some say the lowest IP address of any loopback interfaces thats advertised into the NSSA area.

I havent been very good at updating my blog lately. The reason for this is that i have been really focused on doing labs. Im still doing Narbik’s labs. They are great! They really make you think about what you are doing and contains the nasty 007 tricks 🙂

Cool useful functionality this time around. Even though it has little to do with CCIE (in the way i have not encountered it on any blueprint :)), i was asked to implement a functionality to make sure we always had the most recent configuration from our routers.

I wanted to give a status update on my study progress as it stands on February 28th 2010. At the moment im still hitting Narbik labs. There are alot of good ones, and i havent even hit the troubleshooting labs yet.

First off, thanks to the two sites below, i finally learned what this beast was about. Thanks guys! Human Modem CCIE Candidate I got around to play with fallback bridging yesterday. I want to summarize its important points here. To understand it in the first place, it helps to give some information on why its needed.

I had a very long day at work yesterday, but still felt like doing a lab when i got home. My next lab was about fallback-bridging. Yet another topic i know nothing about 🙂 So today/tonights plan calls for figuring this technology out.

Yesterday evening I was playing around some more with SNMP and sending different traps. I was mainly playing around with my 3560 switches. They were running IOS 12.2(35)SE1 (IPServices). What struck me as odd was the behavior when configuring multiple snmp hosts.

I was just playing around with some switching labs. As i was doing this, i ran into configuring SNMP, sending traps when mac-addresses was added/removed, and all sorts of other things. I could (as in the lab) just set the IP address of the NMS (Network Management System), but i wanted to actually make sure that these were being picked up correctly by an NMS.

I thought i would write a bit about my bootcamp last week. Here’s what I have come up with. I will update this as more thoughts flow into my head 🙂 Day one at Narbik’s bootcamp: —————————– What an eye opener.

Im done packing for Narbiks bootcamp next week. I will be flying out tomorrow morning and probably be at the hotel at around 1ish in the afternoon. I have brought my training clothes, and hopefully ill get to utilize the hotel gym facilities during the day.

More Narbik Labs. I have arrived at the BGP section, and its very good. It touches on some more obscure features that are really useful. One of the things i ran into was the use of advertise-maps, exist-maps and non-exist maps.

Making up a list of things i need to bring for the bootcamp. I finally want to try and be a bit more organized regarding this on this trip. I thought id do that best by starting writing all the things i think i will need straight away, and then go back and forth on the list

Last night i was doing some Vol.2 Narbik Labs. I was supposed to filter some OSPF routes entering the routing table on a certain router. I chose to use an extended access-list because, well, just because i could. The command i wanted to use, was the router-config mode command “distribute-list”.

Welcome back to part 3 about OSPF and external routes. In this post I will focus on type 7 LSA’s. These are LSA’s thats created within an NSSA area. An NSSA area is, as you may know, an area which is meant as a stub area (no type 4 and 5’s), but will still allow for external routes to be introduced in the area.

Welcome back to the 2nd post about OSPF and external routes. Last time we spoke of OSPF and how it behaves in regard of external routes in a single “normal” area. By normal, it implies an area that accepts all types of LSA’s.

I want to create some posts about the actual behavior of OSPF in regards to external routes in different areas and how everything behaves. It might take more than a few posts, but I hope you’ll keep reading them 🙂

I have been working on some OSPF scenarios lately. These was sparked by a post by Joe Astorino @ IPexpert. They are about the use of the forwarding address in Type 5 LSA’s generated by an ABR because of a Type 7 LSA in an NSSA area.

The link below is an excellent read from INE that you should really take the time to read. I am working on a post about the OSPF forwarding address, as well as some MPLS stuff. Stay tuned 🙂 I just wanted to get the link out there.

The new CCIE lab version is in effect. Called version 4. The first guy on OSL (Online Study List) has been through it, and there’s certainly some changes. First up, is the annoying OEQ (Open Ended Questions), these were on the retired version 3 as well.

This small post will be about a little feature called “views”. This feature is used to create a sort of profile, for which you could have a certain user do certain things. As you might know, the only way to do this previously was to use the priviledge level command.

I want to show the behavior of the uRPF feature. Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding. Basically this is a security feature, to prevent spoofed source IP address (very basic). Its function is to prevent a router from processing a packet comming from an unknown source/wrong interface.

The role of the designated router has been bothering me every now and again. I always end up forgetting its role, where its present, and how its elected. So i thought i would post some info on it, maybe to keep my own mind fresh 🙂

This topic has been bothering me for a while actually. In the last couple of years we have seen a wave of so called “social networking” sites. Those are sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. What these sites are supposed to bring you is a sense of being closer connected to your friends, family and peers.

I have just landed a new job. It is a networking company, doing alot of security, ip telephony and general network consulting. The company can be found here. It is called NetIP. The company is located about 30km from where I live, so a little drive in each direction is nessecary.

Its been a while, and for that im sorry. I have been very busy watching VOD (Video On Demand) classes from IPexpert. Scott Morris has done these videos, and he is pretty good at it in my opinion. There are alot of new stuff as well.

So a simple concept right? Tunnel your L2 protocols through a switched network? I agree, but as usual, i put more complication into it. Basically a VOD from IPexpert on L2protoco-tunnel used to create a trunk connection. In the video it is shown that you can create a trunk by using a l2protocol-tunnel (STP in particular).

I am getting used to hearing Scott Morris’s voice by now 🙂 I am doing Video On Demand classes at the moment. Im starting from the beginning and going through them one by one. Lots of new things to learn and study.

The lack of posts recently has its cause. I have been playing around with a screencast. The problem boils down to compressing the video somehow. I made a recording, and unfortunally it was recorded in a too good of a quality, resulting in a pretty big filesize (~300Mb).

Here is the brainstorm about the preparation on the CCIE lab I have come up with so far. Remember that this is no final list or any “magic pill” of any sorts, it is just some thoughts I have been having.

Intro: Authentication is a critical part of administrating your network devices. For the longest time, i know for a fact that alot of companies use a simple authentication mechanism. Namely a either a line password, or at best local user database authentication.

One of my last tasks at work before I stop, is to create a new switched network for a location in Estonia. It will be a 10 switch network. The company is reusing two 3560 switches which I still need to receive.

Lately I havent been keeping up my chores on the blog. Theres a good reason for this. I have really been studying hard to do the written exam again. Done lots of practice tests, a lot of technology focused labs on especially some edge areas where I wasnt 100% sure of things.

Right now Im working on security topics! This is by FAR my weakest area according to all the tests. I am approaching this from the ground up. Reading exam certification guide. Taking notes. Try it out on the lab. All the things i get wrong, i read whitepapers/documentation on.

If you are into the world of CCIE stuff, you know that both the written and the lab exams will change very shortly. Alot of emphasis will be put onto the task of troubleshooting networks. From the onset this seems like a tricky part to teach anyone, and it is.