Internetwork Expert Volume II: Lab 1 Tasks 3 through 10

Finally I was able to finish Lab 1 from IEWB Volume 2. I am not sure how everyone else did this first lab but I was able to stumble my way upto BGP. After that I checked my answers with the solution guide on task by task basis. I know that’s not how you are suppose to do these but since this was my first attempt on an 8-hour long lab, i thought why not.

There are a few tiny errors in the solutions guide that you will have to be careful about.

• Task 3 was related to IGP where I had to configure OSPF, EIGRP amd RIP. It was not that difficult but as always you have to read the whole section before you start configuring anything. Towards the end there is a basic redistribution scenario that I messed up
• Task 4 is BGP and I was able to setup basic connectivity without much trouble. However, I failed to realise that we need to configure Route-Reflectors! Now if I had drawn the Layer3 on paper, It would have clicked but didn’t do it on first attempt. Once I checked the solutions guide, I realised “doh”. I was really excited that I got the RegEXP on first try and now I am actually liking them. Messing around with Best Path Selection was not a big deal either but this was ONLY a level 5 lab so I am not getting too carried away.
• Task 5 is Multicast and I will be honest that I did not even attempt this on my own. I went through this line by line trying to understand all the basics behind the questions. I have done a few multicast deployments but here I wanted to learn all the steps involved so ended up using Solutions Guide. I am looking forward to more multicast labs and I really need to figure out the best way to troubleshoot multicast.
• Task 6 was a basic IPv6 scenario. I thought it was 6to4 Tunnel but ended up being a GRE. That says that I need to spend more time with IPv6.
• Task 7 - QoS: I have to admit - I was not that great with Traffic Shaping and always doubted myself with the Bc and Be values. Narbik did a great job in his Workbook but for some reason it was not clicking. Well I read IE’s explaination and i “think” I have Traffic Shaping down! I tried it on 3 different scenarios and it worked everytime. Then I thought to myself, there is a reason I was double major (Computer Science/Mathematics) so now I feel great about Traffic Shaping. I am hoping this happiness is permenant though.
• Task 8 - Security: I looked this up on Doc-CD and would be reading more about it tomorrow. Basically we have to make sure that a syslog message is generated everytime SYN packets are received.
• Task 9 - System Management: I had to look this up too. Configuring RMON, SYSLOG server and NTP.
• Task 10 - IP Services: Here I was asked to configure basic IP accounting, HSRP and NAT. Not too bad but still need to read more on these.

Overall, I am not sure what to say. I didn’t finish the lab in 8 hours, I had to look through the solutions Guide but the best part was that I was able to read the question and 90% of the time I was able to figure out what exactly they want me to do. I am really looking forward to Lab 2 now and hopefuly I can finish that by friday.