Narbik always recommends one attends his Bootcamp, study, then attend another one.  Narbik just so happens to have one coming up in Sydney from 29th September to 3rd of October.  He offers the resit for free too…  Makes sense I suppose as you have already been supplied with the training materials so you don’t need to pay for them again…

I found Narbik’s course excellent, and the best training course I have ever attended, except for ones I delivered of course ;)  (in case you forgot I am a CCSI and MCT)

All jokes aside, Narbik has upcoming courses in USA in California in October, November and December; Dubai in October and December; Malaysia in October and Amsterdam in September and December.  Please stay out of the “Coffeeshops” in Amsterdam whilst attending the course.

If you want to get your CCIE studies well on track, then I urge you sit one of these courses.  However if you live in Adelaide, then do not sit one of these courses.  I would prefer it that there were less CCIEs here as it would make me look better.

This is what I will be doing next, just to recap then ts off to the land of the big bad assessor lab!

MST - not hard, but I dont get much exposure to this so I will do it again

DAI/DHCP Snooping - not something I do much either

BGP - Conditional advertisement, aggreration with leaking specific routes, communities and regexp (is there anything else left in BGP? :P)

Multicast - not difficult, but not exposed that much to it.

Done Security now..  I dont mind security.  As we all know, all you need to do with Security is change a few ACLs here and there, isn’t that right?

That means I have finished all of Narbik’s Advanced Technology Books.

I will go through the sections I think I didnt do too well in, then sit an assessor lab to see how I am really going.  My next post will be about the topics I wish to cover again before sitting the assessor lab.  Thing is, it seems so long since I did switching or OSPF that I might have forgotten it all!  No L2/L3 means dont bother with anything else in my opinion.  Ill go and have a quick look and see how much I really did forget.  Hopefully not much

Now I am going off to drink beer with my new workmates!

So no study tips or hair pulling today!

Finished QoS today.  I think the worst part about QoS will be the wording of questions…

“make sure bandwidth is reserved during congestion” = MQC Bandwidth

“limit to xxx” police

“expedite forwarding” prioity [bandwidth|percent]

etc etc

Remembering some of the formulae required can be a bit of PITA as well.  I can remember ohms law from school electronics class so Bc = CIR * Tc shouldnt be too difficult now should it?

I have to criticise Narbik now.  Just finished a book labelled Volume 5 of his advanced technology focussed workbooks.  Thinking I am ready for some mock labs and all that.  Forgot that Volume 5 is actually two books.  Damn you Narbik!  Go back to Carlton United Breweries and drown in a vat of crappy beer or something.  Speaking of Narbik and beer, I recall buying him his first Coopers Sparkling Ale when we were in Sydney.  Best beer on the planet!

http://www.coopers.com.au/

Damn… Just picked up the second half of Volume 5 and realised I still have 30 more pages of QoS to do.  Back to it…

Did multicast…  for some reason I always thought it would be difficult but Narbik’s book brings you through it quite well.

Static & auto RP, dense, sparse, its all in there.  I think I’ll redo this section towards the end just so I get exposure to it again.  Which leads me to the next question..

Multicast???  WTF???  I remember the last networkers I went to.  At the start of each session (50-100 people) they ask what technologies do everyone use…

OSPF? 90% put their hands up…  BGP? 70%, MPLS? 10% VoIP? 50%, QoS? 40% (funnily enough the gap between QoS users was directly proportional to the VoIP users experiencing issues)… Now, who uses multicast?  Out of 15 or so sessions, each with 50-100 in them one ONE BLOODY PERSON puts their hand up for the WHOLE DAMN WEEK.

Yeah! Lets make it work 6 (???) points of a CCIE Lab…  To me that indicates Cisco think multicast assumes 6% of work we do is multicast.  Sure, make switching worth 20 points, OSPF 30, BGP 20, IP Services 10… whatever… But im my opinion multicast is that obscure and unused that it is only in there as a subject to test people on.. Rather than a real-world indication test of technology.

Having said that… its not too much of a bad thing, as CCIE isnt all about the stuff you would use on the job now, is it?  But maybe just a good (and I do mean “good”) way of testing our IOS-fu.

IP Services… one of the interesting ones.  Really something you could just ? through and get it right?  Maybe…

I think I will do ok…  I’ll need to watch out for the “make sure xxx happens” though.  Same old, same old.

Its not 5:30pm Friday night.  What should I do?  More study, or go out?

Not hard at all is it?  Narbik’s book is quite comprehensive.  Al the foundation stuff with a largish lab at the end on protocol redistribution, 6to4, 6 over 4, routing etc.

I find IPv6 quite user friendly as being a “new” IOS feature the code has been written more recently and if you dont do something right it tells you nicely rather than telling you cryptically or not even telling you at all.  Examples being ipv6 unicast-routing not enabled or OSPFv3 not having a router-id.

I normally do both those things as soon as I start configuring IPv6 so make things easier so I dont need to go around restarting processes and potentially bugger something up later.  These are just the two things that popped into my head first.

Moving on to some NAT now…