This blog is late and very light in content. Week 12 was missed due to being out at the global sales meeting, this put me somewhat behind on my studying, but was a valuable time to learn what the new stuff that is coming out.

Sunday

Took the night off, recovering from travel and catching up on a lot of house work

Monday

INE multicast videos – Sparse mode, Auto-RP, BSR

INE QOS labs – still need to work on the math for figuring out the Bc and Be values. I know the formula Tc=Bc/CIR, which would mean Bc=CIR*Tc, it’s more the conversion of the Tc time needing to be in seconds or CIR needing the be in milliseconds

Tuesday

Flash cards

Small INE ATC Lab

Wednesday

Flash cards

Small INE ATC Lab

Thursday

Flash cards

INE multicast videos

Friday

Flash cards

Saturday

Flash cards

Hours studied: 16

This week was tough from a motivation perspective. I found it hard to get into a zone for doing any labs and also watching videos. I have my brain a break to hopefully reset. I think part of the problem was I stopped exercising. I’m going to get back to that and see if it helps with my focus.

Sunday

Flashcards. Took the rest of the night off

Monday

Flashcards.

Types up hand written notes. Also worked on documenting my weaknesses. Going to spend more time of the topics I wrote up

Ine atc videos. IPv6 routing

Took the night off from labs due to back pain

Tuesday

Flashcards

Lab – Worked on DMVPN with VRFs, also worked on getting ready to start Cisco360 labs, ran into some problems using chrome to get it to launch SecureCRT instead of Terminal. Firefox seems to work better, but still some annoyance around that as well. It’ll take some getting used to the different interface that 360 provides

Wednesday

Flashcards

INE Videos – OSPFv3, MP-BGP for v6

Lab – Couple of MPLS

Thursday

Flash cards

Friday

Took the day off

Saturday

INE videos – 6pe, 6vpe, multicast

Hours Studied: 24

Sunday

I took an easy day of going through INE ATC Videos: BGP iBGP techniques, route reflectors and confederations

Monday

Flashcards

INE ATC BGP videos

Labbed BGP – backdoor, aggregation, communities

I spent some time catching up with a study partner who has scheduled his lab. A few of us were able to talk strategy and what to expect on lab day.

Tuesday

Flashcards

Wednesday

INE ATC Videos: BGP NLRI, best path selection, traffic engineering methods

Built a more detailed lab schedule  to try and start figuring out when a possible lab date may be feasible. I know I’m still a long ways off because there are some things I still need to practice, but I’d like to start penciling in a goal date to work towards

Lab – Continued with BGP, communities, conditional advertisement, filtering techniques

Need to work on regexp, forgot some basics and made my formula to complicated, which also didn’t work

Thursday

Flashcards

Lots of videos, finished up INE BGP videos, started IPv6

No labbing as I got back late from work

Friday

Flashcards

BGP ATC labs, pointed tunings, ttl-security, allowas-in, ORF

Revisited MPLS to practice Nick’s MPLS router verification steps, want to be able to know this out thinking about it as MPLS is a place I stuggled and need to know better

Saturday

I started the day with flashcards

I then dove back into INE full scale lab 1 for the 2nd attempt. This time I think it was easier, but I did still get tripped up on a couple of things. First one was a redistribution issue where EIGRP native routes were being fed back in from OSPF causing a loop. I think I resolved it with a route-map filter, but ended up breaking a traffic flow I needed, I didn’t get a chance to go back and fix this before the rack time expired. I also solved some of the problems I was seeing by introducing a summary route, I don’t think I broke any rules and it got the result I was looking for. I think I am starting to be able to read between the lines of a task and start filling in ways to fix issues in creative ways.

The other things I ran into that tripped me up was CoPP and some SSH specific modifications that I need to check my config vs the solution guide still.

I think my speed is getting a little bit better, but lab stamina is still not there. By the last hour I had a very hard focusing and was missing easy things when verifying from the beginning.

Hours studied: 17.5

Sunday –

Took the day off to clean up the yard

Monday –

INE ATC videos on redistrubtion and XtremeIE videos

Was going to lab, but the INE site was down and wasn’t prepared to start using the Cisco 360 material

Tuesday –

Xtremeie bgp videos anfd for labbing I worked on INE ATC OSPF filtering

Wednesday –

Cleaned up time sink apps off my iPhone as I noticed I was picking up my phone to distract myself. I got back into the flashcards using the ANKI app

Lab – OSPF filtering continued

Security – AAA authentincation methods

Thursday –

INE ATC videos, redistrbution and BGP intro

Took night off from labbing

Friday –

Flashcards

Lab – BGP traffic engineering, playing with best path selection options

Saturday –

INE Foundations lab 1, attempt 2

This time going through the lab I never looked at the solution guide as I was going through. Normally when I lab I will do a task, verify and then check the solution guide. I want to get into the habit going through the entire lab and then grading myself using the solution guide, a tip I’ve picked up from some study partners.

Only got 3 things wrong, possible 4, but I have the correct results on the one I’m not sure I would get points on or not, I had extra configuration because I did not read carefully enough

The 3 things I for sure got wrong evolved around portfast vs portfast trunk, forgetting to advertise a network statement in EIGRP for passive interface to work and my subnetting math being wrong for an aggregation (I’m counting this wrong even though I did get the same result, but the aggregate contained to many addresses).

This lab went very quickly. I started at 10:30am and ended at 12:45pm, there wasn’t a task listed that I didn’t think I could do, I was never searching on how to do something. I did use the docCD to steal some config for some IPSec. For the grading, it took about an hour, but I was also eating lunch while doing this. I graded based on results and not config. The reason I did that for example is the solution guide used classic EIGRP where I used Named mode

After foundations lab, I worked on some ATC Security topics for further practice since the foundation labs don’t have any security or services tasks included