Internetwork Expert Volume II: Lab 8

After getting owned by Lab 7, I was looking at something to get my confidence back. After going over the whole thing, I don’t think it was the lab that was difficult, it was more of the fact that I didn’t understand the basics of redistribution and that in turn reflected on the whole lab.

So what did I do different? Thanks to CCIEDownunder, I went back to IE’s COD for redistribution (total 4.5 hours) and took notes while watching. Brian Dennis did a GREAT job explaining the concepts behind redistribution and this is where I think Narbik was left behind. Narbik’s theory is that he cannot teach logic – well we need to know how things work in the background before we will get the logic.

So after understanding the famous 2-Step process, I did a few redistribution tasks in my head whle sleeping and everything made sense lol. So what was the end result? I was able to finish the redistribution task of lab 8 in 10minutes. I know this was not that difficult but I was actually looking forward to a redistribution task for the first time rather than running away from it.

• Task 1 – Switching: Switching was basic and straight to the point. As always reading ahead was the key because they were asking for MST instances. Nothing stood out here.
• Task 2 – Frame-Relay: This section had one task related to multilink PPP over frame-relay that I got stuck on. I was able to locate the documentation but didn’t implement that solution correctly. Just have to be sure on the order of operation otherwise this section was not that bad.
• Task 3 – IGP: Basic configs for OSPF, EIGRP and RIP. To my surprise, while I was working through the tasks, I couldnt wait for the redistribution task. Once I got to it, I just worked on it one step at a time and this was the best I have done on redistribution. I can’t thank Brian Dennis enough for his work that helped me understand this interesting concept. I got so carried away with redistribution that I totally messed up EIGRP variance in the end.
• Task 4 – BGP: BGP as always was lengthy but if you draw out everything then you won’t have any problems. I always draw out my BGP topology and then link the routers according to the peering sessions. That helps me understand if there is a full mesh or not and whether I need to use next-hop-self. I went through most of the configs without trouble until I hit task 4.3 where they wanted full reachibility but I was not able to use link advertisement or next-hop-self. This is where you can use a route-map with set ip next-hop peer-address command and it works out great. Overall the BGP section was very time consuming and kept me thinking whether to use communities or confederation etc. Great work IE!
• Task 5 – Multicast: A basic multicast setup that I really messed up towards the end. I think I was just tired and was not thinking straight but the good part was that I knew exactly what solution to use. Implementation went awry in the end but oh well. Leant how to convert broadcast traffic into multicast and then back to broadcast to support legacy applications like a stock ticker.
• Task 6 – IPv6: This was a nice refresher for a change and I was able to go through the whole IPv6 section without much fuss. I did have to look up in the SG for the redistribution of IPV6.
• Task 7 - QoS: You can increase the queue size of the frame-relay shaping queue to avoid excessive drops. Use “frame-relay holdq xx” command to accomplish this task. Then there was LLQ task along with a WRED implementation. These are the things that you should handle once you are done with the core tasks and need those extra points in the lab.
• Task 8 – Security: Most of the security tasks were related to using access-lists and policy-maps. Key to this is that you need to understand the requirement and then think about what solution you are going to implement. Another section that should be taken care of when you are done with majority of the lab.
• Task 9 – System Management: This goes over how to turn off proxy arp and then how to enable WCCP. I was too tired to work implement IP SLA so I just read the SG. Then there was HSRP to finish the lab.

Overall, this lab was tough but not that difficult. I still took my sweet time going over everything and I am no where close to finishing a lab within 8 hours. I really need to hurry up and get done with these labs and start vol 3 labs. I am already behind schedule due to workload @ work but hopefuly I can get done with these within this month.