CCIE R&S V4.0 Troubleshooting GNS3 Lab 1

Hi Everyone,

It is my pleasure to announce that I am publishing the first CCIE R&S V4.0 GNS3 TS lab in this post. I would first like to apologize for the delay. I know that many people have been waiting for this, so here you are.

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CCIE R&S Troubleshooting GNS3 Labs soon available

I will soon publish 5 Troubleshooting CCIE R&S Labs based on INE GNS3 Lab1 topology. I have made these labs with one of my friend when training for the CCIE R&S troubleshooting section. Each lab has 9 tickets and is a bit harder than the real lab exam.

As the topology is based on GNS3 with around 30 routers you will need a powerful machine to run GNS3 on it. An alternative will be to use Amazon Web services and build your own online server in order to run GNS3 on it.  We have used a High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance which is maybe a bit overkilled but it was working really well.

Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,

Laurent

My CCIE Lab Training Strategy

So time has come for me to share with you, how I did to plan my CCIE Lab training and which tools I have used for that.

 First of all, let´s look at some numbers regarding my CCIE Lab training:

•  1509,5 hours of training (including blogging but not the 10 days bootcamp from INE)
• 14 months training
• 2 weeks break
• 55 weeks of training (not including the 10 days bootcamp from INE)
• 26 as average hours training per week
• 49,5 as max hours training per week
• 50 Saturdays used for training with an average hours of 5,7
• 50 Sundays used for training with an average hours of 5,6 hours
• 150-200 hours used for blogging
• 3 attempts

My CCIE plaque has arrived

Yesterday I received my CCIE plaque almost two months after passing the CCIE R&S Lab. The quality is good and it is quite heavy.  Here is a picture of it:

My next post will be dedicated to which training material I have used from INE as well as which training strategy I have used to pass the CCIE R&S Lab.

Thanks for reading.

/Laurent

The story of my third attempt

As you may already know, I passed the CCIE R&S lab on the 12 of March 2013. I wanted to write about my story just after I passed the exam but I really needed a break so here is the story of my third attempt; the last and the successful one.

 I arrived in Brussels one day before my exam, on the 11^th of Mach, it was a Monday. I needed to take 2 planes to get there, one from Denmark to Frankfurt and then one from Frankfurt to Brussels. I didn’t have any delay on the first flight but things got worse in Frankfurt because it started snowing a lot. My second flight was 2 hours late and I arrived quite late in Brussels, around 20:00. I was staying at the same Hotel (NH hotel, besides Cisco). When I got in my room, I was feeling alright until I got to bed. On my second attempt, I was really nervous during the night and I only managed to sleep around 1 hour. This time it was better but it was really hard to fall asleep; however I slept better than on my second attempt. I woke up at 07:00 and went for breakfast. I tried to eat not too much but just enough to get the sufficient energy for the exam. I was quite nervous but for sure less than on my second attempt. At 07:45, I walked to the Cisco building and there was so much snow outside. It has been snowing all the night. I heard that all flights in Frankfurt were cancelled this day so I was lucky to take the exam that day and not on Wednesday. When I arrived at the Cisco building, the proctor came to pick us up. We were less people than the last time. I asked the proctor if I could keep my watch as I like to use the Stopwatch fonction to time myself, even if the only time that does matter in the one chosen by the proctor. The proctor had a look at my watch and said that it was alright. Then the fun began with the TS section. The topology appeared on the screen and I started straight away to have a look at it, trying to understand it as quick as possible, looking at the different routing domains, IPs, etc. Then I started to read all the tickets and visualize the part of the topology related to each ticket. Then I started with the first ticket. For each ticket I asked myself what was the problem and what could be the different reasons causing this problem. This time I changed my strategy and decided not to leave all the 3 points tickets for the end but instead leaving only one 3 points ticket for the end and I think that it was the right strategy as I had sufficient time to spend troubleshooting the last 3 points ticket. When I was finished with the tickets (expect the 3 points one), I decided to verify all the tickets and ask myself on every tickets: “Did I break any rules in the TS guidelines?”, “Did I picked up the best solution to solve the issue?” Once I had verified all these tickets, I started to troubleshoot, the last one, the 3 points ticket. I couldn´t solved it 100%, I wasn´t able to get the topology stable so I thought, “ok, if I miss 3 points, then I can still pass the TS, even if I miss another 2 points ticket”. I was feeling quite confident on the TS this time but you can never be sure at 100 %. By the way, I was finished with all the tickets (expect the last 3 points) within 1 hour 15 minutes, and I would advise when training for the TS to aim finishing around this time (1 hour 10-20 minutes) so you get time to verify everything correctly and also spare time if something goes wrong. Then the countdown timer ended and the configuration section started.

One of the best feeling!!! CCIE# 38520

Hi everyone!!!

I passed the CCIE lab today!!! This is one of the best feeling I have ever had!!! I have been studying like crazy the past few months and I thought that my journey will never end.

I will make a post later on how it went…More to come.

/Laurent

CCIE# 38520

MPLS Layer 3 VPNs Troubleshooting

I would like to dedicate this post to MPLS L3 VPNs troubleshooting and more particularly using the Traceroute command. It can be sometimes difficult to find out where is the issue when testing connectivity between sites attaches to a MPLS VPN backbone. I will explain the behavior of Traceroute in MPLS VPN environment which is quite different than in “classical” IP environment. Finally I will talk about the MPLS LSP Ping feature and how to use it to detect break in MPLS LSP.

Topology:

 

I am using almost the same topology as the one used in this post: Basic MPLS. I have just added a P router.

 Platform/IOS:

 Cisco 2691/12.4(15)T11 Adv IP services

 First of all if you want to get a basic understanding of MPLS and MPLS Layer 3 VPNs I suggest to read my previous posts: Basic MPLS and MPLS Layer 3 VPNs

 The following is already configured:

• MP-iBGP between R2 and R5
• EBGP between R2 and R1, R5 and R6
• OSPF area 0 between R2,R3,R4,R5
• LDP between R2,R3,R4,R5
• R3 and R4 are P routers and R2 and R5 are PE routers
• R1 is representing the CE device at Site A announcing its loopback address 1.1.1.1/32
• R2 is representing the CE device at Site B announcing its loopback address 6.6.6.6/32

 In this troubleshooting scenario we want to focus on the loopbacks reachability between Site A and Site B.