Saturday 30 May 2015

Book Recommendation

Received this book recommendation today... will buy it soon and try it out:

Chinar Trivedi @IP_MPLS_LabGuy 7 minutes ago
I'm recommending you, highly a book If you are not aware till now. on , and by .
 
http://www.bookdepository.com/IP-Routing-on-Cisco-IOS-IOS-XE-IOS-XR-Brad-Edgeworth/9781587144233

More details to follow...

Friday 29 May 2015

Home Lab setup

Home Lab Setup

 
So I got my first delivery today for my home lab setup. I bought 4 x 2811 routers, they were $55 each from ebay. 
 


Unfortunately they came with IOS version 12.4, which is not what the CCIEv5 lab is based on. :(


So I thought I'd upgrade it, but unfortunately they also came with 64MB flash. So I hopped back on ebay and bought generic 256MB flash cards for $15 each. I looked at the cisco ones but they were just too expensive for my lab environment. Received them and upgraded my routers :)



So each router has cost me $70 and I'm going to spend my weekend cabling them up to start doing some labs. Total cost for my CCIE lab so far = $280

In other news, I went through the Layer 2 labs on INE. I understand better now the difference between port cost and port priority. Port cost is applied on the interface of the switch that you want to change the spanning-tree selection on, whereas priority is applied on the upstream switch. I'm going to do a few more examples on this to really cement it in. I also went over VTP but learnt nothing really new, except the implementation of version 3 which seemed quite easy.

Saturday 23 May 2015

The Beginning...

I'm going to use this blog to log my journey to CCIE.

Aim: To sit my CCIE Lab exam in February next year

Method:

1. One - two hours of study every day - after which I will blog about what I've learnt. The idea of writing down what you've learnt is a hint given by Narbik to make the most of your study.

2. Studying through INE labs and Narbik's labs. I have just completed the 5 day CCIE R&S bootcamp which was amazing and the best value. I am going to purchase some routers to practice some of the lab scenarios Narbik has provided.

3. I will sit the written exam in September

4. I will do the 10-day CCIE R&S bootcamp in December.