q's with warren sullivan ccnp

Today i welcome warren sullivan as a guest of insearchofthecert... i posted his stp enhancements a few days ago which was really well received... he has a site of his own now called http://www.mycertstudies.com/ which you'll want to pay close attention to as it progresses... i asked him if he might take some time and talk about his certfication journey, ups and downs, etc...

  

thanks for chatting warren...

   

Thanks for having me arteq....

  

give us a description of how you began, the road to ccna and then ccnp, study methods and materials, equipment, the whole smash...

No problems Arteq, first of all let me say that my website is in its infancy, there really is nothing of importance to see there yet, but check back in a few months time, there should be some worth while stuff in there by then….i hope! Ha Ha

Where I started is a funny one, it all started back in 2007 when i was on a work related training course and i tried to get a PC to talk to a router, sounds like a simple task doesn’t it…. obvously its clear to me now what the problem was, but at the time....it baffled me, and fascinated me all at the same time. The router already had an interface IP address of 192.168.1.254/25 and i had assigned the PC an IP of 192.168.1.1/25.....same network i thought....why isn’t his PC pinging! Thats what started it all, one of my more geeky course mates told me that they were on different subnets! WHAT! Different subnet?

So i decided to enhance my knowledge with some research into subnetting, and i learnt the basics and realized where i had gone wrong....it fascinated me to the point that all i could think of was subnets and how the mask defined them. I let it be and sort of forgot about networking for a while due to work commitments.

About a year later, my workplace enrolled me on an ICND1 course with a cisco learning partner here in Australia, i thoroughly enjoyed the 5 days, so much so that i decided to self study to fill in any holes in my knowledge and sit the exam, i joined the cisco learning network and started asking questions, i used the course material that i obtained on my ICND1 course, built a small lab of 4 2600 series routers and 5 2950 switches and passed the test with flying colors. My first Certification!

I fell in love with the exam, so well constructed, so well written, i knew i had found my new career path....networking

From there i jumped straight on ebay and purchased some new equipment, a 2511-RJ console server, a 3550 layer 3 switch and a few more 2600's, got some WIC-2t's and a bunch of serial cables from china....i was set, i purchased Wendall Odom's ICND2 Cert guide and Todd Lamlie's CCNA fast pass and i studied hard, reading every chance i had, labbing, reading and more labbing, cisco learing network for questions....i had all i needed, i sat the exam 3 months after my ICND1 and i was a certified network associate!

From here i had some big decisions to make, should i go for a specialization? should i go for the CCNP? i looked at wireless and security, and whilst i love the idea of getting in there and getting dirty with the technologies, i really felt i needed to learn more about core routing and switching, so i started studying for my CCNP.

My plan was an exam every 3 months, that would have me certified CCNP by christmas 2011, that was the plan anyway....

Starting with the ROUTE exam as that was what i was most comfortable with, switching was ok but i didnt have the funds for the required switches anyway at the time. I started by reading the ROUTE Certification guide, cover to cover, no labs, no notes, just reading, its a very in depth book that delves so much deeper into the technologies than CCNA did, i loved it!

Then i went back to chapter one and started reading again, took notes in an A4 book, lots of them and labbed everything i came across, and i mean everything, at the end of every chapter i did a consolidation lab with everything from that chapter in it, and only when i could talk confidently about a technology would i move on to the next one, and that went on for the rest of the book, i sat and passed my ROUTE exam around April 2011 from memory, it was a fantastic exam, really really enjoyed it, hard, detailed and edge of your seat type stuff from start to finish.

Then onto SWITCH, i had ordered the OCG and FLG 2 months prior from the states, they took 3 months to get here! never again amazon! anyway i managed to get together some temp funds for the purchase of 2 x 3560's and 2 more 3550's, my plan was once i passed the exam i would sell them and reclaim the expense.

I followed the exact same routine as for ROUTE, but i focused on the FLG as i had heard that the OCG was lacking somewhat, and i was brand new to switching. I was enthralled with SWITCH, amazing stuff, stuff i never knew existed, it was incredible, i had a small bump in my path to certification, my little baby boy matthew was born on the 8th of May, what an amazing time in my life, i gave myself 3 weeks off and got back into it....having taken that time off i found i had lost some of the knowledge i had learned, as you do when you learn things for the first time, so i started again, finally sitting and passing Switch in November 2011, WOW, what an exam, very tough and very well written once again, cisco has a knack of writing exams that will only be passed by people who know this stuff inside and out.

Passing SWITCH in Nov created a problem with my "certified by christmas" plan, so i booked my TSHOOT exam for December 23, i figured that i was all over the technologies, i just needed to hone my troubleshooting skills, so i watched nuggets and to be honest, it wasn’t a great help, Jeremy has done some amazing work in other series, but the TSHOOT series just didn’t gel with me, so i employed the help of the Cisco learning network, i built my lab buy mimicking the TSHOOT topology with GNS3 and real switches, i bought a truck capable NIC for my PC and i had the lab humming well, a mirror image of the actual testing environment, i uploaded my topology to CLN and ask people to break it for me, and they did!, i would go through and fix it and PM the problems and fixes to the people who broke it, i did this about 20 times and i had a great feel for the environment.

One great piece of advice i received was to treat the environment like your own network, get to know it, inside and out, for example, you should know what would come up on a sh ip route on any router without even hitting the CLI...and i did, a trick i learnt was to simply draw the topology on a piece of paper, all IP addressing, HSRP configurations, VLANS, allowed VLANS....the lot, all on a piece of paper, without looking at any reference material, id then check it against the actual topology and screw it up.....and do it again, and again.....by the time i got in that exam seat, i knew that topology backwards.......i passed

with 100%

I was a CCNP! YAY!

what's next on your agenda?

Present day - I have made my mind up after weeks of thinking, do i go for CCIE? Specializations? or Service Provider certs?

My dream job would be a network engineer at a commercial ISP....so Service Provider Certs it is, starting with CCIP then maybe CCNP SP Operations, then some specializations in wireless, voice and security, then eventually onto CCIE, the Mecca!

redist...

here are some links to follow through with for route redistribution which was discussed here a couple of days ago... three are from INE, which i'm beginning to believe is one of the best resources out there... the other is from the horses mouth...

http://blog.ine.com/2008/02/09/understanding-redistribution-part-i/

http://blog.ine.com/2008/02/19/understanding-redistribution-part-ii/

http://blog.ine.com/2008/03/17/understanding-redistribution-part-iii/

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_tech_note09186a008009487e.shtml

we often lament the incredible costs of these certifications in materials, books, videos, etc. but keep in mind, cisco.com has everything under the sun and it is free... they give the blueprint for the exam, and every possible configuration, every possible question can be answered under their roof and at no cost...  the trick is figuring out how to use it...

a couple of things...

this path we've chosen is difficult; the information is often esoteric and you really have to love this shit to succeed at it, or it will become dry and boring...  single minded purpose is a phrase i often think of... that was a phrase a great wrestling coach of mine used all the time when i was a high school wrestler... single minded purpose... and intestinal fortitude...

when i went through marine boot camp, the other recruits, the ones getting close to graduation would always tell us newer recruits, "to stay motivated" and we would make it...

you have to really dig deep sometimes to truly know what you're made of... the path to ccie will show you what you are made of one way or another...

STAY MOTIVATED...

fhrp...

hsrp (hot standby routing ptotocol) and glbp (gateway load balancing protocol) as well as vrrp (virtual router redundancy protocol) are first hop redundancy protocols... hsrp and glbp are cisco proprietary while vrrp is open standard...

the protocol belongs protecting the gateway from failure... the gateway is the first hop... it is essentially a virtual router (logical) as backup to the physical gateway, the next hop... since it protects the gateway it belongs with the gateway...

this has been my dilemma... in most every document i have looked at the placement of the virtual ip has been on the interface, the hardware, the gateway...

that interface, that gateway, may very well be an svi...


dsw1#sh int vlan 10
Vlan10 is up, line protocol is up
  Hardware is EtherSVI, address is 000f.8ffe.0980 (bia 000f.8ffe.0980)


for me, it has been vital to recognize these protocols for what they are...  first hop protocols... or as is glaringly stated by glbp; gateway...

sometimes i do get ahead of myself...

guest post... Elvin Arias - lsa types and special areas

doesn't get better than this... Elvin is a friend from CLN; very knowledgeable... i came across this post of his this morning and asked for permission to print it for the faithful out there... he said, great... i've been concentrating mostly on ccnp switch this past month (really?) but after adapting my network yesterday to include route redistribution in the new topology, this suddenly appeared as if  from the god's... so, we're going to mix it up a little today and throw a bone to routing... it is stuff like this that makes keeping your eye on CLN a necessity... so when you go over there, look up Elvin's other wonderful posts, and tell him arteq said thanks...

ELVIN ARIAS on LSA Types and Special OSPF Areas

The special area types were created in order to filter certain LSA types; the trick here is to know the LSAs that are going to be filtered, because the routes are represented by the allowed LSAs inside the area. Let's define the "must know" LSAs at a basic level:

Type-1 LSA – It’s is the Router LSA; this is defined in order to send the link state information about the attributes of the directly connected routes, besides of that you have just ONE type-1 LSA per every router inside your area.

Type-2 LSA – It’s the Network LSA; this LSA is specifically defined for Broadcast and Non-Broadcast network types. This is managed by the DR of the segment and there is just ONE type-2 LSA per segment.

Type-3 LSA - This is the Summary-net LSA; this LSA is normally in designs where you have multiple areas, so the ABR is in charged to convert the intra-area LSA types to this type of LSA in order to differentiate the intra-area routes from the inter-are routes. There is one type-3 LSA per route.

Type-4 LSA - This is the ASBR Summary LSA this basically identifies the ASBR of a specific area (note that inside the area where the ASBR is this LSA will not exist, instead the type-1 LSA will be used in order to announce the ASBR of the area). Who is the ASBR of the area? The type-4 LSA is there in order to answer this question, so this is injected by the ABR in order to announce the presence of the ASBR in a particular area.

LSA-type 5 – This is the ASBR External LSA; these basically are the external routes, one type-5 LSA per route.

LSA-type 7 - This is a special LSA used for special area types like NSSA and Totally-Stubby NSSA, this basically resides in a particular area and doesn't purely go out instead is translated by the ABR to type-5 LSA. This logic is very important because this is the foundation to learn how the NSSA and Totally Stubby NSSA special areas work.

Now that you have general view of the LSAs and what they do you will see that the general objectives of the special area types is to filter the LSAs that are entering from the area border router (ABR) to the area, and in the case of the NSSA areas is to filter the LSAs from the ABR, but passing the external routes inside the area to the other areas. You will normally find these areas where there is only one exit point (but in some cases you can have designs where multiple exit points exist), that is just one ABR in order to go out of the area.

There are basically four types of special areas:

Stub Areas - This is RFC compliant. This basically filters the LSA-type 4 and 5 in order to avoid the reception of external routes inbound the area, note that the type 5 LSA are basically the external routes plus their attributes, and the type 4 LSAs are the attributes of the ASBR. You will just have inter-area routes inside this area (routes with the "IO" code) in the routing table. This behavior is accomplished with the "area x stub" command inside the OSPF global process, note that ALL the routers inside the stub area will need to set the stub flag to establish the adjacencies.

Totally Stubby Area - This is Cisco proprietary. The Totally Stubby area is there to filter type-3, type-4, and type-5 LSAs, so what are you going to receive in order to reach the inter-area, and external routes? You ABR will help your area injecting a "quad zero" default-route inside the area. The command to accomplish this is the "area x stub no-summary" inside the OSPF global process.

Not-So-Stubby-Area (NSSA) - This area is there for situations where you are redistributing external routes, BUT you want to filter the LSAs that could come from your ABR. This areas use a "tricky" mechanism in order to do this, which is the type-7 LSA. The type-7 LSA is there in order to trick the area, because normally in this types of areas you have external routes (from external autonomous systems), so you will need to send those routes through your ABR in order to inject them into the other areas, BUT as i said filtering the reception of the type-4 and type-5 LSAs. You will basically see "IO" routes (they are in the routing table because of the type-3 LSAs), besides the "N1/2" routes which represents the NSSA area. Note that in order to inject the already mentioned default route you will have hardcode it. Note that this is  not the case of the other special areas. The "area x nssa default-information originate" is used in order to accomplish this mentioned behavior (if you don't add the "default-information originate" keyword the router will l not be able to reach unknown destinations, because the default route will not be injected.

Totally-Stubby NSSA – It’s Cisco Proprietary. The exact same dilemma of the NSSA in the sense of redistribution inside the area, but wanting to filter not only type-4 and 5 LSAs, but type-3 LSAs, so inside the area you will only have a default route, besides the "N1/2" routes that are normal on that type of area. The "area x nssa no-summary" is used in order to make the area TS-NSSA.

If an area is converted to a special area ALL routers must agree about the stub flag, so ALL the routers must have the “area x , because if this is not the case the adjacencies will not be established.