Hours studied – 19.5 hours

Sunday – I took a little break from labbing and was able to catch up on some house work. I built my little guy a sandbox, which he has not left since it was finished. To close out the day I watched some OSPF videos.

Monday – I continued working through INE foundations 2. One of the new things I learned working on DMVPN with IPSec where the GRE tunnels shares the same outbound interface there is a caveat to remember for applying the policy on the tunnel, must use the shared key word or only 1 tunnel will be encrypted.

I got stuck after setting up L3VPN. Was able to get MPLS up and running, VPNv4 routes up, CE-PE routes worked, I could see CE to CE connectivity in the control plane (routes showed up from each CE) however the data path would not work. I ran this past the study group and we were not able to resolve it before the rack time ended. I’m going to get back to this week 6.

Tuesday –  I watched an older recording of MPLS Troubleshooting with Nick Russo. Nick did a webex a long time ago that I am revisiting and taking notes on again.

Wednesday – Indepedence Day, spent it in the pool

Thursday – I continued watching Nick’s MPLS troubleshooting video. I was able to write out the steps he goes through when troubleshooting L3VPN routes and how to follow the tags throughout the network and verify the truth.

I also did some IPv6 labs. I need to get used to some of the differences and also get my typing acuracy back along with getting better at reading the ::’s

Friday – I worked on one of my weaker topics, Multicast. I find it very tedious typing ip pim sparse-mode on every interface, but ones that’s done I spent a lot of time on how to verify and follow the routing paths.

Saturday – I spent about 5 hours on INE full scale lab 1. This is my first full scale lab getting back into the studies. The lab helped identify a few weaknesses for me to help me refocus on what to practice and learn. There’s were some of my struggles that I need to work on

1. Read between the lines/steps. There are steps given, but conviently leave out some key underlying routing that needs to be completed in order to accomplish the task. What I need to work on here is better understanding of what is being asked, identifying the gap in the request, configuring it and verifying.
2. Verify as I configure. I got ahead of myself and kept configuring without verifying as I went.
3. Redistribution, this is a double edge sword. I was able to get redistribution working first try. I scripted everything out in notepad and had no issues pasting it into the routers. The thing I need to challenge myself with though it to stop using tags. If the restrictions take tags away from me I am screwed. I also need to look into alternatives such as summaries
4. This comes back to number 2 which is verify, I also need to read all the requirements. I forgot simple things because I didn’t read carefully enough
5. Configuration specifics
   1. IPSec, transform sets – tunnel vs transport > need to memorize the differences
   2. DMVPN Phase 3 – shortcut vs redirect > which one goes on the hub
   3. Practice BGP communities – typing was slow

I also found that for this 5 hours of straight configuring drained me. I need to work on my stamina and also my speed, however right now speed is not my focus. I kept score as I went, however didn’t finish the lab, so I will post this at a later time.