Should Have Gone With Cisco

It seems IPExpert has some new study materials coming out in the next week or so. They have a new blended learning solution that comes to you on a external hard drive. Looks pretty sweet! Check out the R&S demo.

Just when I thought I was getting caught up! I can’t help but be curious.

If you already have the V9 stuff, you get to upgrade to Vol1 and Vol2. The Vol3 part of things comes with 10 mock labs with a video walk through. What better than a live walk through? It’s nice to have someone share their tips and tricks with how they approach each lab.

They are offering the 1st lab for Vol 3 free as a demo. Check it out yourself. It’s cool because proctor labs supports the grading which saved me from doing a stare and compare.

I thought the 1st lab in Volume 3 has really improved. Right away I noticed the topology map was new. A problem I have with the Version 9 stuff is I found myself memorizing the network diagram. Having a new diagram is really helpful because you need to get practice drawing things out in your own way that makes sense to you. Seeing a new diagram layout gave me a good impression to start with. The lab went well, check it out.

That reminds me, I need to work on my Virtual template configurations. It’s not that they are hard, but the authentication requirement kept breaking my connectivity!

Here’s a nice tip for those using SecureCRT. In doing my CCIE studies, I have 10 different sessions open, and after some time, I’ll find that my sessions are timed-out. I end up having to clear the lines of the Term server to get them back. I’m not sure if this will apply to all versions, but I’m using version 3.3…

Start by going to Options >> Session options

Next, edit session options. Basically you specify a time interval and what you want to send to session every 120 seconds in this example. I just hit the space bar to put a space in.

This will keep your sessions active by adding a space every so often so they don’t time-out. I used this tonight and it saved me some time. I hate having to clear lines, it really ruins my day…

Anyways, probably not new information, but hopefully some find it useful.

Ted

A lot of people have been asking for this, so here you go. It goes with the new Routing CCNP self-study book. Remember, you have to have some experience with Dynamips for this. I was running everything on one box, with two separate instances of the executable for stability reasons. If I remember right, I didn’t need to use both pods at the same time either (I only started what routers I needed). There are obvious adjustments you will have to make too. The BB router configs you can get from online if you bought the book. I believe I reference them in the config below.

(more…)

I came across this article on Cisco’s site:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/105/pmtud_ipfrag.html

It’s a great read, and covers a lot of information that will help you minimize fragmentation issues across your network.  It’s great for understanding when routers fragment packets and how to configure Path-MTU-Discovery.  It’s also helpful if you have GRE or IPsec tunnels in your network.

One thing that stands out is to remember that Path-MTU-Discovery relies heavily on certain ICMP messages.  Routers reply with “fragmentation needed and DF set” and you won’t hear about it if your firewall is blocking ICMP.