Narbik’s Bootcamp - Day 3 (BGP)

What a day it was today! This was like the longest BGP lecture of my life. He has changed his method from last classes and started off with teaching us how to optimize BGP. He thinks that if we know how BGP works then it won’t be hard to work with BGP. After the lecture, we have about 260 pages of labs! Talk about stress and hard work. Narbik expects each one of us to get 100% on FR, Switching, IGP and BGP. I think he covered each subtopic under BGP and my head is still hurting with all this. But as soon as I started doing labs, everything started making sense. One of the many things I like about Narbik’s labs is that they are VERY simple. He doesn’t want us to worry too much about topology but wants all our attention on the actual technology. That’s why most of his scenarios are around 3-4 routers with easy to follow IP addressing scheme so students don’t get lost trying to figure out the topology. So in BGP he covered almost everything under the sun including peer groups, templates, route dampening, ORF, synchronization, you name it.

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Narbik’s Bootcamp - Day 2

I was not able to finish all the Frame-relay labs last night so I am already behind. I think I will dedicate my Saturday & Sunday for all the leftovers. Today we covered OSPF and EIGRP with 40% lecture and 60% hands-on labs. Narbik started off with OSPF lecture and covered every single thing about OSPF you ever wanted to know. As always the starting point was that OSPF is a linkstate protocol and I thought to myself “Damn I already know that, is that why I am here?” but by the time he was done - I was like WOW! I didn’t know all this about OSPF. So we had the lecture from 9am - 3pm with a lunch break in between. At 3pm we started cranking the OSPF labs until 7pm. I was not able to finish all the labs so got some more leftovers for the weekend. I have tons of notes from the lecture that I will try to post here later on.

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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.

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