So I took ICND1

I had a rough day at the office. I got in to work and the internet was down. We have two links, but for various reasons services are segregated between them for the time being. I’m also putting in an ASA soon and I only want to screw around with the network configuration once, so i’ve been holding off. Anyway, our ISP told me it would be 30 minutes, but when it took longer than that I decided to move stuff to the other link. Once I get the ASA in place I’ll set the two connections in an active/passive configuration. This still creates problems for my asterisk server though, and I haven’t really thought about a solution yet. It will probably involve SNMP traps and some scripting. Anyway, after doing a debrief on the morning’s troubles with the management, I left for my exam.

I had originally been planning to go home at around noon to do some review, so I left my ID there (I almost never carry an actual wallet). When that didn’t happen I had to go home, then get back downtown, and then run to the exam from the subway. Being my first exam, I wasn’t sure how strict they would be about arriving 15 minutes early. To top it all off, it was pouring rain and I didn’t have an umbrella. It was only a 3-4 minute run from the subway, but I was totally drenched, right down to my pretty shoes. When I got up to the testing center, I was only 10 minutes early instead of 15, and they told me the woman that administered the exam had left. They tried reaching her so that they could log me in, but it was looking like I was going to have to reschedule. I was actually happy about this turn of events. It had been a bad day, I was wet, there was no A/C, and I didn’t get to do my review. The woman returned their call as I was walking out the door. Anyway, I rolled up my sleeves so that they didn’t stain from the marker and that horrible erasable board (why can’t they give you a proper pencil and paper?). I finished the exam in 60 minutes and got a 944.

ICND 2 is on Tuesday, but I will probably reschedule to Thursday because I think I’ll end up doing over-time tomorrow night. I spent most of the weekend reviewing the ICND2 book but I want a bit of time to do the boson practice tests, and fix anything I’m not 100% on. I’m not going to violate NDA, but I will say that it was easier than the Boson practice exams that come with the ICND1 book. There was one question with terminology that didn’t appear in the book, but that’s all I’ll say about it. I’m too lazy to read the NDA and remember exactly what it covers, so I’m just going to limit what I say when it comes to the exams themselves.

Overall, I am behind schedule. I finished the ICND1&2 books about a month ago, but am just now getting to the exams. This is irritating to me, but I have had a lot of over-time at work in the past 3 weeks. I was going to quit my job on the 30th, but one last thing has come up that will make a good point on my resume, so I’m going to do that before I give my notice. Then I will be able to go full speed ahead on the certifications. Regardless of that project, As soon as I am done ICND2 I will begin studying for BSCI. I’d like to take the test before the COMEBACK2009 promotion is over on July 20th. That gives me about 3 weeks. It might be pushing it, but I have nothing to lose. If I believe others on how hard it is, I will probably fail, but I figure I can get through the book in a week, then do labs the second week, and review on the third week. We’ll see, but if I fail it’s not a big deal because of the free retake. Then again, if I’m really not ready, and think I don’t even have a shot at passing, I won’t take it. I’d like to go through the cert process without failing anything, if at all possible.

Headaches with dynagen and fun with OSPF

I just enjoyed a pretty good chardonnay from argentina, so this will be brief.

I put up 9 routers and a 2 switches in dynagen to do a 3 area ospf lab yesterday. It killed my Ubuntu installation. I used a live CD and it didn’t even recognized my / partition as ext3. I just decided to reinstall, since the only thing I use it for is dynamips. Once I got it back up and running, I set my .net file to autostart=off. Sure enough, when I got to router #8, things started to go haywire again. I was using sparsemem and ghostios and running in 64-bit linux. I don’t know if this is normal or not. I had tons of memory left. Anyway, it wasn’t working, so I had to figure out how to run multiple instances of dynamips. I’ve now been running 3 instances for 10 devices without issues for several hours. I’m going to add the last 2 devices now and to how it goes.

The other issue I ran in to is with router 8, I’d get a message saying “206-unable to create UDP NIO.” I checked the ports I had listening on my computer, but the ports that were reporting an issue (udp 10007) were not being used for anything else. It was baffling, but I manually set the udp ports for each instance and the problem went away. This is what my lab.net file looked like:

[localhost:7200]
udp = 10000
[[2611XM]]
image = /home/blah/Desktop/cisco-ios/c2600-advsecurityk9-mz.124-9.t1.image
ram = 128
WIC0/0 = WIC-2T
slot1 = NM-4E

[[ROUTER R1]]
f0/0 = S1 1

[[router R2]]
f0/0 = S1 2

…

[[ethsw S1]]
1 = access 1
2 = access 1
3 = access 1

[localhost:7201]
udp = 11000
[[2611XM]]
image = /home/blah/Desktop/cisco-ios/c2600-advsecurityk9-mz.124-9.t1.image
ram = 128
WIC0/0 = WIC-2T

[[ROUTER R4]]
f0/0 = S2 1
f0/1 = R7 f0/1

…

[[ethsw S2]]
1 = access 1
2 = access 1
3 = access 1

[localhost:7202]
udp = 12000

etc…

It worked and i didn’t concern myself anymore with it.
I haven’t done that much reading in the last week because I did a fair amount of overtime at work. I polished off chapters 9 and 10 in the ICND2 book though (OSPF and EIGRP). Personally, I don’t think you learn anything from doing labs similar to the setups you see in the book. They are so simplistic that it’s almost impossible to make them not work.

What I like to do is take a pen and paper and design a network, the more elaborate the better. I try to stick to best practices, but sometimes I deliberately do not. I originally put 10 routers in my OSPF lab, but scaled it back to 8 after dynagen killed my system. The point is, I try to introduce complexity. That is how you learn. It forces you to do two things.

1. you do a lot of repetitive router configuration. This permanently etches the commands into your head.
2. when you add complexity, you almost always introduce mistakes into your configuration. This forces you to do troubleshooting, and there is no better way to learn. It’s great to get OSPF working with 3 routers like they do in the ICND2 book, but seriously, who uses it in the real world with 3 routers? What skills do you learn besides super basic configuration?

Anyway, I setup my 8 routers into 3 areas, using a mixture of serial and ethernet links. I didn’t follow any configurations from the book and didn’t look at the commands. Router 3, which was connected to all 3 areas had all routes, but the internal routers of the various areas didn’t have routes to subnets in different areas. It took me a little while to figure out, but as soon as I realized that you HAVE to have an area 0 (and that I didn’t have one), and that it’s not just an arbitrary number, everything else started working. It felt good when I figured it out, and I’m really glad I’m starting to get in to more complex things.

I’ll likely finish the ICND2 book this week, and then I will spend a week or two cementing my knowlegdge before I take the exam.

Lab Equipment

I’ve decided to use dynamips/dynagen for my routing labs. Of course, you can’t do the switching stuff with dynamips and so I purchased 4 Catalyst 3350-emi switches and a 7-port usb hub with usb NICs. Going with dynamips is mostly a heat/noise consideration as opposed to a money one, as 4 switches + a couple computers is loud enough. I leave the switches off whenever I’m not using them.

Most people usually recommend against buying 3350-EMIs for a CCNA. I bought these because I am 100% sure that I will proceed to CCNP and then CCIE in a short amout of time. If you’re not sure, you can definitely get by with something cheaper. Even so, 3350s aren’t exactly expensive anymore. Hardware is always getting cheaper, so there is logic behind buying only what you need at the time.

The verdict is still out on this setup. I setup a 5 router lab in dynamips today and even though I have a 2.33ghz quad core with 4gb of ram, the damned thing keeps crashing on me. I find myself typing wr mem after every configuration change I make so that I don’t have to keep redoing it. I’m running Vista 32 fwiw.

I recently setup Ubuntu to dual boot from, but on the last update ubuntu became unbootable and I haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. Tomorrow I may try to do that and get dynamips running on linux at the same time. It’s just not stable enough under vista to run big labs, even if you have the hardware to support it. I’m using 2611XM routers so it’s not like I’m using tons of ram either… Anyway, I’ll let you know how it works out.

Time to start the updates for real. Post #1: My Reading List

I just finished my university courses and am now able to focus on cisco with 100% of my free time. I’ve been going through 60-80 pages per day in the ICND1 book. Some of the theory is new and some isn’t. I’m finding it very easy and surprisingly enjoyable reading. I read with a highlighter and I review every 2-3 chapters on a different night. I’m on chapter 15 as we speak, although I skipped wireless. I’ll go back to that later. I’m most interested in the core R&S stuff for the time being. I can’t say that there’s anything I’ve had difficulty with at this point. It’s all very straightforward at this level.

Anyway, about a week and a half ago, I received a large order from Amazon. As you know, I’m intending on working right through to the CCIE, maybe with a stop at CCDP/VP, but I haven’t decided that for sure yet. Either way, I bought a good number of books that have been recommended by others on various forums. Here’s the list.

• CCNA Certification Library by Wendell Odom (comprised of ICND1/2 books)
• CCNP Cert. Library 5th Edition (comprised of BSCI/BCMSN/ISCW/ONT books)
• Internet Routing Architectures
• TCP/IP Illustrated Vol. 1
• Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture
• Routing TCP/IP Vol.1, 2nd ed.
• Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols
• Interconnections, 2nd ed.
• CCNP Lab Portfolios

That’s a lot of books (16 total). I figured that I might as well buy them all at once in case I want more detail or a different explanation on a subject right from the beginning. The Odom books are well written and organized though. People that aren’t sure they want to go this route should probably just buy what they need.