Hopefully if I remind myself of how thick I am by posting it here I will eventually remember

send-label on ipv4 peers for inter-as vpn
advertise sham-link loopbacks in the right vrf on the PEs rather than the default ipv4 address family *facepalm*
send-community on all peers – not just when it first asks. Subsequent peers need it too

to be continued. Time for wine.

PS Chelsea play Liverpool tonight. We better win. It is in Liverpool’s best interest to lose too. We want to stop United for surpassing their league championship record. So do it for yourselves Scousers and do the Blues a favour!

Well… I have been too busy studying to update things here. Since my last post, I have been though the IP Expert SP Volume 1 book about 5 times. Yes 5 times. You need to go though the tech-focussed books that many times to get it all. If you think you can do the Volume 1s once then do the Volume 2s once and then expect to pass a lab then good luck to you…

My glitches on the way and the things I left out to sort were:

MPLS-TE:
Dont forget to add mpls traffic-eng commands (router id etc) to your routing protocol

L2 VPN:
Just remember connect & xconnect

Inter-AS VPN:
EIGRP redistribution: use the “local” ASN for redistribution into BGP rather than the “global”
Dont forget send-label on all the BGP neighbours. I always forget to do that grrrrr

With a semi-heavy heart I dropped my SP date. I know before I said I didn’t want to wait until July or later but I’d rather wait until July and have a chance than do it in April and balls the thing up altogether.

Incidentally, there was a date available on my birthday. If you think I took that one well…

My studies have not been progressing very well. Main reason for this is I am moving house next month and most of my energy has been going into that. Trouble is I have a date scheduled “sometime in the Q1 2010″. Now… It will be pretty borderline for me to sit within Q1 next year. So I log into the scheduling tool to see if I can postpone by a month or two and I am hit with this:

18-Mar-2010 ( 1 seats available)
19-Mar-2010 ( 1 seats available)
09-Jul-2010 ( 1 seats available)
13-Jul-2010 ( 1 seats available)
15-Jul-2010 ( 1 seats available)

July? WTF? I dont think so!

If I got my arse into gear once I move I am sure I’ll be fine. Not much going out, lots of study and all that… But it still means I need to pay soon.

What to do, oh what to do?

Guess who got their CCIE exactly one year ago today?  I’ll give you a hint.  He is very smart, good looking and oozes charm.

Despite all this and you still guessed me well there you go…

So how have I celebrated my Anniversary?  Well I’m on the way to my SP exam now.  Unfortunately as I have mentioned previously, lab dates globally for SP are few and far between.  I really don’t know why.  I would have thought the rack hardware and cabling would be identical (or otherwise very similar) to R&S so it would be easy.  Then again with R&S v4 now out the topology for R&S has changed therefore it no longer would be similar.  Have to be honest when I say I have not seen any 1841’s acting as a PE next to a 6500 or something.

So #22386 might celebrate tonight by having dinner in one of the restaurants near my place in Melbourne Docklands.  Shame I can’t make the trip to the Qantas Club to blow myself to oblivion like I did one year ago today…

This is ridiculous… When I passed my written, no dates available until mid March 2010. A week or so later, end of March… Now, no dates available in Sydney until 14th April! Now.. I don’t know if I’ll be ready by then or not, but methinks I better grab one and drop in January or February or something because otherwise I won’t get a date until December 2013 or something!

Ok.. I am officially odd. I’ve studied for about half a day today and I have to say I’m really enjoying it. I just suppose that lately on the job it’d been all about typing stuff into documents and drawing pictures as opposed to typing stuff into green boxes with a cli running ios.

Whenever someone at work wants a hand with some config or some troubleshooting I seem drawn to running over and helping. Don’t get me wrong I prefer the consultative side of the game where I’m seeing clients and giving a preso but I am still attracted to the tools I suppose.

The only reason I’m not tapping away into my lab is because I’m on a train going to someones house to drop my parachute off for some routine maintanence (it’s in perfect order, but would you jump a rig which was not maintained?) and I am using the Wordpress app for iPhone to type this in. Let’s hope the auto spell checker was merciful this time.

The photo is my rig getting comfy at the train station.

Well… My Internet had been throttled due to excess downloads* and as such browsing is about as pleasurable as itching powder in your wetsuit. What that means is I have time (after eggs Benedict for brekky!) to start my SP lab studies!

So… It all begins again.

*before you ask, my excess downloads were not due to hitting the torrent sites. In my infinite wisdom I decided to use OSX mail instead of web based mail which I have been doing for the past 16 years or so. Once I type in my account details mail then proceeds to download every single email i’ve received or sent since the inception. Bye bye download limit!

Work wants me to do more wireless stuff… I don’t mind. It’s all good. We have one “Wireless Expert” here and they wouldn’t mind another in case he gets hit by a bus or something. Seems they are reasonable on people redundancy too.

Anyway… I can’t seem to find any decent reading material… What do I read? Really can’t be bothered with doing the whole CCNP-W because I don’t want to do 5 exams. I only want to do one (computer based) exam.

So what’s a good book? If there is no book for the CCIE-W Written is reading the CCNP-W books ok? I imagine they would be? While we are here, what are the CCNP-W books? I’ve never even looked before.

Well it has certainly been a while since I have been here…  I am sure you have all missed me very much.

So in my past 9 or so months of negligence, I’ve decided to come back here on my birthday no less.  A lot has happened since I was last here.

I’ve moved to Melbourne from Adelaide, and for the good part of this year I’ve been doing some consulting to a variety of places.  Main one being the Government of Victoria’s Education Department.  Which has a total of  about 600,000 (!!) users.  Of course nothing goes wrong when you have more than half a million students all with laptops on the wireless networks, gigabit lans etc is there?  Consider that probably about 150-200k of them would be male and in between the ages of 15 and 17 there should be no problems.  No dramas with security/script kiddies (literally) and bit torrent usage at all?

Today I sat an interview for a service provider.  Part of it was a tech interview where I was drilled by CCIE #32xx.  When this guy started on the job (which included 8 years in TAC) I didn’t even know how to spell QoS or ISDN.

Anyway… suppose we will hear about it soon enough.

Cheers