Okay, Xmas is over and so is new years as Im writing this. Im behind regular postings, I know, which is frustrating. I am done with the preliminary reading and lab work for ISCW, but I dont feel prepared for it at all.

So today I have read a couple of more chapters about IPSec and GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation). I have also watched quite alot of CBT on IPSec VPN’s, which really helped clarify somethings. But I also really think its a hard topic to get to grips with, especially since you only get “half of the story”.

Im studying IPSec VPN’s at the moment. There’s alot of terms, protocols and exchanges taking place, and they all use names thats really hard to tie together with what they are doing 🙂 Isakmp for example, what does that do? well, it stands for Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol.

So I just started work toward the ISCW. The lab book for this is huge, so I think its going to be alot of lab work, and alot of lookups on Cisco’s doc site for further information. My reason for this thinking is the lack of a self-study guide for the ISCW exam.

Thankfully I passed BCMSN. Thank god. It was driving me nuts. Passed with an 864, which im satisfied with. I am thinking about my study technique for the ISCW. I need to see if I can structure it somewhat better than BCMSN, where I ended up reading some topics over and over again.

I am trying to get some reading done, even though its extremely hard when im still sick. However, I only got about 5 chapters left in the examination guide. hopefully I can finish them soon, and do some of the last case studies in the lab book.

Sorry for the non-posts. I am quite sick at the moment. Some stomach issues that apparently takes its time to settle. I was hospitalized 10 days ago, but got out the next day. Since then, I have not been to work or been doing anything at all actually.

I now need to do the remaining labs in the lab portfolio. There are especially some case studies that bridge all the knowledge together (or so it looks like, we’ll see). I do know however, that wireless is a huge area in and by itself.

I have a sneaking suspecion that I better pay alot of attention towards the wireless section of the BCMSN. It seems like its “out-of-scope” of the BCMSN, but Im quite confident that Cisco will really smack me on it for some reason.

Lately I have been in the need of the right equipment for quite a few labs. What I really need is some equipment that is able to do both Dynamic Arp Inspection (DAI) and IP Source Guard (IPSG). The dynamic arp part is supported on 3550’s as far as I can see, but IPSG is not.

Been reading the study guide about L2 security. You can really mess up a whole network very simply, and you can basically take down the whole thing pretty easily if your switches are not configured correctly. There was also alot of things about IP spoofing and ARP spoofing.

Well, I broke the spanning-tree topology at work today. It was not one of my proudest moments 🙂 I was playing around with the very delicate portfast command, which states in all its glory: “%Warning: portfast should only be enabled on ports connected to a single

So im studying redundancy features, especially gateway redundancy features. I think this is some impressing technology. Basically there are three versions, HSRP (cisco proprietary), VRRP (IEEE Standard) and GLBP (cisco proprietary). HSRP was introduced in 1994, and VRRP in 1999, GLBP is alot newer, introduced in 2005.

Been reading about CEF yesterday. It doesnt take up much of the exam blueprint, nor CBT nuggets coverage of it. However, it seems that theres more to this than what meets the eye. I also need to figure out what CEF is doing in routers.

Today I have spent about 2,5 hours studying different features that enhances the switched network. This includes labbing up BPDU guard, Loop guard, UDLD Aggressive mode, BPDU filtering. Also I find the automatic error recovery feature very interesting. You can set certain causes to put an interface into the errdisabled state.

I have been working my a** off trying to understand STP just fairly well. Its a hard topic, especially with Rapid STP. I have struggled with the synchronisation/proposal/agreement thing. It has helped seeing it on the equipment though. An alternate port can be switched to immediately.

Sorry about the lack of posting/progress reports. Also the server has been down for a while. In the meantime, I’ve passed the BSCI exam with an 833 score. Really got my ass kicked on some topics I didnt expect (IS-IS), and ofcourse multicasting which has turned out to be my arch-enemy.

Well, at least some of it. Adjacencies and how IS’s update other IS’s is the thing that nobody can give me an answer to. According to all the material IS’s maintain adjacencies to all others, but still elect a DIS.

So yesterday, I started with all the lab exercises that has to do with EIGRP. I did the one in the self-study guide, and one (2.7.1) in the lab portfolio. I also started on 2.7.2. So far, the labs in the labportfolio are far better written than the ones in the self-study guide.

Alright, I am done with reading about EIGRP. I am now skimming through the chapter, and taking notes. I have an okay understanding of how EIGRP works, and I am looking forward to the labs to nail out unknowns. I am not 100% convinced about taking notes, or rather doing it in the order im doing (reading first, then skimming and taking notes, then going to the lab).

Today, I am continuing reading about EIGRP. My goal for today is to get at least 40 pages of EIGRP reading done. Lots of nitty gritty details such as unequal-load balancing and route authentication. To understand and process the material, 10 pages takes up 30 minutes of reading time.

Chapter 3, EIGRP. Started reading about the inner workings of EIGRP today. EIGRP is an improved distance vector protocol provided by Cisco themselves. It is an improved distance vector protocol, because it passes updates directly to its neighbours. It is more advanced than traditional distance vector protocols, because it supports VLSM and it does not use periodic updates.

Okay. I will try and document some information regarding my study to attain the BSCI (Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks) exam. This is by many considered the hardest exam on the CCNP track (1 of 4 exams). I will tackle this one first, and then continue forward to the other exams knowing they will be easier.

Okay, so its been a while since my last post. Been having some issues to deal with, which has taken quite alot of energy. I am going for the CCNP, starting with the BSCI exam. Ive got the books for it, and started studying.

I am happy to report that I managed to pass the CCNA exam yesterday. What a relief.

Here it is:

Hopefully Maibrith passes her exam today as well!!

Update: She did pass it!

So, test is scheduled for tuesday, and im looking through and updating my notes. My plan is to look through all of my notes on the morning, trying to pick up on anything I might have missed during my studying.

I read on Slashdot today, that a “Jack Thompson“, walked out of court, apparently because he was being disbarred for 10 years. I couldnt quite remember who he was, but then it dawned upon me, he’s the smock thats been trying to ban what he thinks are violent games, because he’s of the opinion they are bad for society.

I just purchased a Rack from Dantrak UK. I need some sort of solution to mount the gear I have and will be getting. I cant have it all lay around the floor. They (Dantrak UK) is basically a reseller of Dantraknet.

I like sunny weather when its moderate, but temperatures in the 25+ Celcius range is a bit too much for me. Especially when I need to spend time in front of my computer. I will need some kind of cooling solution this summer for sure.

Interesting indeed.

I was checking piratgruppen.org (A place in favor of sharing things online) the other day, and found that a new site, rettighedsportalen.dk had been started by a former spokesperson of piratgruppen.org. The site aims to shed some light on immaterial “rights”.

Im writing this on my 3rd HP laptop in 2 years. This is a company owned laptop, because if not, I would never have purchased another laptop from Hewlett Packard. My first HP laptop was a so called NC8430, which is in their line of business laptops.

This is cool, a p2p program based on real life trust. Alliance is a program that everyone has seen before, but with a twist. Instead of searching everybody and their uncle’s stash of bits, you only search a much smaller circle of people whom you already trust.

Since starting my now almost infamous Cisco course, I have become very interested in ways to learn new material. How do you plan out a semester, how do you organize a study schedule, where do you study? what kind of tools do you use to get you through it all?

This is another great strategic move by the republican party. Let the two democrats fight against each other all they can, while taking focus of John McCain. Then when the real election cycle begins, they can put credibility behind a claim that the democratic candidates are focusing more on getting elected than the real issues, and they dont have a clear focus on solving the problems that the United States faces.

I watched an iPhone get a dent yesterday. Not a pretty sight. It was my girlfriends iPhone. She dropped it on the floor, and unfortunally it landed on the edge of a doorstep, causing it to get a dent. Nothing wrong with the glass surface or function of the phone at all.

But it is still the number of peers The Piratebay had sometime during the past week.A peer is defined in the bittorrent world as one who connects to download/upload some part of a file. The number 12.000.000 is also about twice the amount of people living in Denmark at the moment.

Been having alot on my mind lately. Ive been writing down the topics I want to give my opinion on, but just havent gotten around to actually elaborating on them. I will try to rectify that over the comming days.

Trip to China cut short. For some reason I fell sick in Amsterdam and had to go back to Denmark. Im out sick until friday where I will get to see my doctor. Im quite convinced that what I experienced was a panic attack that just wouldnt go away for some reason.

I will be leaving for China tomorrow. Will be going with my favorite coworker, along with my boss, his boss and bookkeeping guy. We will travel from Billund to Amsterdam, and then from Amsterdam to Shanghai. Alot of flying. I will be back friday night.