Multicast done!

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.