Narbik’s Bootcamp - Day 1

Finally, the day I have been waiting for has arrived. Its 830am and I am sitting here in the class room. Comfort Inn had a nice Breakfast so I am ready to roll. We have 8 people in the class with different levels of experience. One of the guys has attempted the R&S lab 4 times already. Another guy was in the class with Ethan and Keith so we started talking about the whole Network World fiasco. Narbik looks like a teacher, and I mean Old School teacher! No projector, no power point, no computer screen - Just him and white board and he can spit commands out like a router. Guy knows every single option from the back of his head.

Schedule for 5 days:

Day 1 - Switching, Frame-Relay, SRR Queueing

Day 2 - OSPF, EIGRP

Day 3 - BGP

Day 4 - RIPv2, Multicast

Day 5 - QoS and other leftovers

So today we covered Switching and Frame-Relay. Narbik says that Frame-Relay is the base of your network and almost everything rides on top of this. If you screw up  your Frame-Relay, then your routing protocols are not gonna work. So pay special attention to this! Towards the end of the day, he is going to cover SRR Queueing. He thinks its good to take care of this with switching rather than with other QoS stuff because this makes more sense and gives us time to sleep on it and ask questions later.

Once we are done around 9pm, he expects us to finish 210 pages of labs that can last until 1am. This guy means Business! There were good lectures during the day about Switching and Frame-Relay and even though I considered myself pretty good at Frame-Relay, I still got a few great things out of his lectures.

Now it’s time to take care of those LABS!