Been quite a while since I actually wrote anything – 4 months I think, so thought I better give an update.
My summer has been incredibly busy both socially and studying. Admittedly probably haven’t studied as much as I should have. Generally about 2-3 hours a night for 2-4 nights a week with 4-8 hours at the weekend, when I can with quite a few gaps in between – think I had a 3 week break at one point.
Before I get into what I have been studying, I wanted to let you know that I have changed some other bits to help me study – which has also helped me with goals and motivation.
To start, I spent a lot of time designing and building a menu system for all my routers – which I will post here for people to use if they want to. The basis of this is to quickly load labs up using saved configuration and router menus so I don’t need to waste any time that I could use labbing. Because each configuration loaded needs a separate copy of the menu system, I tried to cater for future labs as well – as you can imagine I have 10 routers, all with about 60+ configurations on each – That’s a lot of menus to change if I need to!
I got all the INE labs built – they provide the initial configurations on their site, but this still took me a long time to go through and change to adapt for my lab (plus i’m pretty anal when it comes to configuration ‘tidiness’ so was removing all the ‘junk’ from the config that they had in there).
I have all the official Cisco prep labs, and my future test labs – where i can mock up scenarios and try different configurations, this will then be detailed in a topology diagram, so I can keep track of the test labs and what they look like.
So as you can imagine once the menu system was built, it was just a case of referencing the correct configuration – even if the configuration doesn’t exist at the moment. Such a good idea and saves so much time.
I have created a Labs spreadsheet which covers all the different labs available from INE and others – I will upload this eventually under the Study Strategy section.
This has a few columns:
- Vendor of the Lab – e.g. INE, Cisco Press, etc
- Lab number to help identify the lab
- Page number the lab is on in the workbook
- Description of the lab
- Menu system numbers – I know the menu numbers to use without having to work it out first (more of a convenience than a time saver).
- There is a date attempted so I can keep track of when I did the lab
- How long it took to complete the lab
- What my current skill rating is on that lab from 1-5
Those last 3 columns are then replicated a few times so I can repeat the lab and hopefully improve my skill rating and time taken to complete.
Found a really good application for a terminal session: SecureCRT.
Most of you have probably already come across this software before – I know I have – but never really used it properly. Been discovering that and how I can run scripts to log on to my access server with credentials and connect to various router consoles all in their individual labelled tab, also how you can send the same command to all open tabs which is convenient
I have been using Evernote lots to make flashcards on all the topics I am going through with quick fire points, actually been writing everything in Evernote – including this before posting online. Really useful app.
I think reading from my last post that I was studying Multicast. I went through all the material and did some labs. I understand quite a bit better than I used to, but will be re-visiting at some point to make sure I understand the finer details.
Most of my studying since has been focused on BGP – which is a giant topic. Definitely worth giving this topic a lot of time to get to grips with everything. I have been watching videos tutorials on BGP and have started doing some labs to reinforce the knowledge. Also been reading Jeff Doyles book TCP/IP Volume II which is excellent and goes into a great deal of depth.
I have been watching videos, doing labs and if there is something I am still not clear about I have been referring to Jeff Doyles book. There is so much functionality with the BGP application (yes application – NOT routing protocol!) that I couldn’t even begin to cover all the sub-topics for it in this update. I have decided though that I will upload my notes to the Topic Notes section – Be prepared there are lots.
Other topics I have delved into include DMVPN, IP SLA, PBR. Although I will probably re-visit and dive into a bit more when I get past the BGP labs. I have also started going through the MPLS material – not got far (while still doing the BGP labs)
I also got into studying the deployment of the Cisco Nexus 1000V switch – slightly off topic but useful to know none-the-less, as have upgraded my lab to now use these – The deployment and migration of these switches is far from simple in my opinion. If it was a greenfield installation from standard vSwitches, then no problem. Migrating from DvS switches when there are no spare physical NICs, thats a different story and took me a while to get my head round that.
So as I said made progress, probably not as much as I would have liked and definitely didn’t expect that quantity of material for BGP – don’t let that one catch you out!
Now that the evenings are getting darker and the days are getting more miserable (and my ability to say no to doing social things – work excluding 😉 ) I am hoping that my social activities will die off and I can get to grips with studying again – mainly because I have written a business proposal for my work to pay for my exams with time frames of the written in December 2014 and the lab next summer. Seems to be getting serious now.