Internetwork Expert Volume II: Lab 12

So after working my way through this lab for 2 days, I am finally done. One word of advice for you, never try to finish these labs in more than a day. This has happened to me over and over again where I will finish everything upto IGP in one day and then start BGP onwards the day after. You are playing catch-up trying to remember what you did in the earlier part of the lab.

This lab was rated at Level 7 and I think that was accurate. They should rename this lab to "Holy BGP!". It had 20 points just for BGP.

• Section 1 - Troubleshooting: Well there were 3 basic errors in the initial configs that were not hard to spot.
• Section 2 - Switching: Detailed switching section that covered many areas. Nothing was that tricky but still covered almost all technologies. Task 2.5 got me where they wanted to do policing without using the policing feature. Storm-control is your friend in such cases.
• Section 3 - Frame-relay: Good frame-relay section that included frame-relay keepalives. As Narbik says, you MUST score 100% on frame-relay. I agree with him
• Section 4 - IGP: I had to configure OSPF and EIGRP with no redistribution. NO REDISTRIBUTION? yes sir! For some reason IE spared us with redisribution in this lab *EDIT* they had redistribution in IPv6 section LOL.
• Section 5 - BGP: This section was very intense but not difficult. I followed my method of drawing the whole topology out and then establishing one peer relationship at a time. Once I got through that, I had a good idea about how everything is going to work and from there figured out where to use next-hop-self etc. I must admit that I am very impressed with this BGP lab and it will test your BGP knowledge for sure. If you don't know how BGP works then you won't go past task 5.4.
• Section 6 - Multicast: I was kind of tired after BGP so wanted to skip multicast for the night. However I still attempted this section with no luck. I am not good with MDSP and I really need to focus on multicast one of these days.
• Section 7 - IPv6: I used this IPv6 lab to test my knowledge on eui-64 and link-local addresses. To my surprise I was able to get this section working without much trouble. I still need more practice on IPv6 along with Multicast.
• Section 8 - QoS: My favorite task as always was Frame-relay traffic shaping. Not much to complain here.
• Section 9 - Security: Basic ACL task
• Section 10 - System Management: Mostly NTP related tasks here and I am hoping my real lab will have easy pickings too.
• Section 11 - DNS: Just had to configure a dns server address

I think I am done with Volume 2 labs tonight. I won't be doing labs 13-20. I will start Vol 3 labs tomorrow because even though I can finish the labs, it takes me forever to do them. I need to work on my speed so I am planning on spending a week on Vol 3 labs. I am hoping to finish these labs in 3 hours so let's see how that goes.