CCIE Prerequisites

There are actully no prequisites to the Cisco CCIE Certification. Cisco do recommend you have at least 3 years hands on experience with Cisco hardware and have an in depth understanding of routing protocols, switches, routers and security devices.

To get  CCIE certification, you must first pass the CCIE written exam. After you pass the written exam, you qualify to schedule and take the corresponding, one-day lab exam on-site at one of the ten Cisco CCIE lab locations. The hands-on lab exam tests Cisco equipment command knowledge and network troubleshooting skills.

I would however suggest that you do not attemp the CCIE without first obtaining some other Cisco Certifications.

CCNA, CCNP, CCSP etc

These qualifications will give you a good groundig in networking theory and concepts and make your journey to the CCIE Lab exam a lot easier.

As first stated in this post there are no CCIE Prerequisites, but this does not mean to say you should just jump in at the deep end, prepare well and remember this is a marathon not a sprint!

Filed Under: CCIE Lab Tagged With: ,

CCIE Lab Equipment to practice

If you are studying for the CCIE or in fact any Cisco Certifcation you will need access to Lab Equipment.

But what CCIE Lab Equipment do you need.

The current CCIE R&S v4 lab exam will test you on the following hardware

  • Cisco 1841 Integrated Service Router, running IOS 12.4(T) Advanced Enterprise Services
  • Cisco 3825 Integrated Service Router, running IOS 12.4(T) Advanced Enterprise Services
  • Cisco Catalyst 3560 switch, running IOS 12.2 Advanced IP Services

But how do you get access to this equipment?
There are a few options, but it all depends on your situation, and how much cash you have!

Setup your own CCIE home lab

This is what I have done and although it is seen as the most expensive solution once you have bought all the hardware and set it up, you have free access to a full rack whenever you want. Also once you have finished your studies you can sell the rack.

My rack consists of 4 x 3560 switches, 6 x 2651XM routers, 2 x 1841 routers and one 3825 router.

Most of the hardware was purchased from ebay and is housed in a skeletek rack, it currently lives in my spare room and I have setup full remote access so I can access it wherever I am working.

I will post more details on my rack in later posts, it is setup in the INE topology which is CCIE training provider I am using.

CCIE Rack Rentals

If you cannot afford the expense of purchasing a full rack but still want access to all the hardware you can opt for rack rentals.
The benefit of this option is you don’t have to purchase any hardware and you don’t have a great rack of kit in your house / garage.
You simply purchase blocks of time from a ccie rack rental company such as gradedlabs.com and then configure your telnet client to connect to the racks remotely.
The pros are less expense, the cons are you are tied to fixed time windows and if you purchase a 5 hour block you cannot stop the clock.

This does focus your study time, but I found this option to be too restrictive.

Virtual Hardware

Using GNS3 or Dynamips you can run the real cisco images on virtual routers on your PC.
This is a great solution as it means you can run routers on your laptop wherever you are, the downside is the limit on the switching capability. You can run a 16 port ethernet card in a router but it is not the same as running real switches.

A lot of students opt for virtual routers and physical switches, you just need a good PC to run the virtual routers and then about 16 ethernet ports on your PC to break out to the physical switches.

If you are going to go for this option I recommend you run GNS3 on Ubuntu or any other Linux distro.

I would highly recommend the GNS3 Workbench http://rednectar.net/gns3-workbench/

Chris has put an incredible amount of effort into this image which you just run in VM Workstation it is an optimised version of Ubuntu with GNS3 installed. You need to supply the Cisco image.

Running GNS3 on my Windows 7 laptop I could only run about 5 routers without the CPU getting pegged, using GNS3 I can happily run 20 routers and my CPU runs at around 30%

So there you have it, a simple run down of the options for CCIE Lab Equipment and how to practice.

If you have any other suggestions or would like some advice on setting up your CCIE home Lab then please comment below.

Good luck with your studies

 

 

Filed Under: CCIE Lab Tagged With: ,

TCL Script – Ping Test

One of the major parts of the CCIE lab is ensuring you have full reachability to your network.

How do you ping all your addresses? TCL script or tickle script as it is usually pronounced is the answer to your problems.

It is a bit trickier now they are using Putty as the terminal client as with Secure CRT there was a neat little trick you could use to harvest all your ip addresses.

using the command sh ip alias – you can easily bring up all all the live ip’s on each device – with secure CRT you could then hold down the alt key and select only the IP addresses.

With putty you will just need to delete some of the fluff – unless anyone knows a way to do this?

R1#sh ip alias
Address Type        IP Address      Port
Interface                150.19.8.8
Interface                183.19.28.8
R1#

So get all the IP addresses from all your devices and drop them into notepad

150.19.8.8
183.19.28.8
150.19.2.2
183.19.28.2
183.19.123.2

Then add the following text to the notepad file

foreach address {
150.19.8.8
183.19.28.8
150.19.2.2
183.19.28.2
183.19.123.2} { ping $address
}

Then once you have all the IP’s from every one of your devices go onto one of your routers and enter the command tclsh this will drop you into the tcl shell.

R4#tclsh
R4(tcl)#

Then paste in the contents of your notepad file and hit enter

R4(tcl)#tclsh

R4(tcl)#foreach address {
+>150.19.2.2
+>183.19.28.2
+>183.19.123.2
+>150.19.1.1
+>183.19.17.1
+>183.19.123.1} { ping $address
+>}

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 150.19.2.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 56/58/60 ms
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 183.19.28.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 56/59/60 ms
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 183.19.123.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 56/57/61 ms
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 150.19.1.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 112/114/117 ms
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 183.19.17.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 112/113/116 ms
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 183.19.123.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 112/115/120 ms
R4(tcl)#

Type exit to leave the tcl shell

R4#

This works on the switches and the routers

It will take you less than 5 minutes to knock this together and if you run it a few times through your lab after you have dealt with redistribution it could highlight some potential issues.

UPDATE – reduce the pings from 5 to 2

If you want to make the TCL Script only ping twice instead of the default of 5 simply add re 2 at the end of the ping command.

{ ping $address re 2

Good luck with your studies.

Roger

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