Now that I have passed the CCIE Lab exam people are asking me “What are the CCIE benefits?” As for tangible benefits to me personally they are in no particular order: I can now go to the CCIE Apparel store and purchase my CCIE Leather Jacket and other clothing with my CCIE digits on them […]
BGP Listen Range Command
BGP Dynamic Neighbors are a way to bring up BGP neighbors without specifically defining the neighbors remote IP address. Using the BGP Listen Range command you specify a range of IP addresses typically on your Hub site (maybe in a DMVPN environment) that you trust to become BGP neigbors with you. When a TCP request […]
Mastering Switching topics in CCIE Version 5
With the new ccie version 5 blueprint there are a lot of version 4 students who are trying to work out what has changed, what is new and what has gone. For new students to Version 5 it is probably just as confusing. One of the changes is the jump to 15 code and the […]
Multicast for CCIE – Lesson #1 – Static RP
One of the technologies that I never really mastered was Multicast. I knew the basics but didn’t really know how to troubleshoot it. This is one of the holes in my knowledge that contributed to my last failure of the CCIE Lab Exam. So in order for that to not happen again I have decided […]
BGP Local Preference Explained
So, what is local preference in BGP? The BGP Local Preference attribute or local-pref is used to influence the outbound routing decision of a router running BGP. The local preference has to be set inbound on routes being received to influence the outbound routing behaviour. A higher local preference is preferred and the default is […]
Multicast Troubleshooting Cisco Commands
The information provided below is simply my study notes and not meant to be a full and complete resource on multicast troubleshooting. For more information please refer to the cisco website – www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk828/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094b55.shtml This list of Multicast Troubleshooting Cisco Commands should help you find most problems relating to the troubleshooting section of the Cisco CCIE […]
How to convert a Multicast Address to a Hardware Address
Working through INE Voll II lab 14 this evening I came across a task where they require you to discover the hardware address of EIGRP. The reason for this is with the hardware address you are then able to block this address to certain ports on a vlan To do this you need to convert […]
How to double your CCIE Study time
For those of you starting out on your journey to the CCIE certification, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material you have to get through. Now there have always been methods to study faster and one of the main ones was always speed reading, now this may be great for some or […]
CCIE Troubleshooting Guides
During my CCIE Studies I have come across many different resources for troubleshooting but one resource that I have found very valuable is of course cisco.com – I have bookmarks and evernote notes for all these resources so I thought I would put some of them up on my ccie blog here to help others. […]
VRRP – Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol
Following on from Part 1 HSRP of this 3 part mini blog post series the next topic is VRRP The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) eliminates the single point of failure inherent in the static default routed environment. VRRP specifies an election protocol that dynamically assigns responsibility for a virtual router it is described fully […]
Private Vlans Explained
Introduction to Private Vlans A normal Vlan is essentially a broadcast domain and all the devices if addressed on the same subnet can communicate with each other. In shared hosting environments, to save on IP address space and Vlans it would be great if you could isolate devices within the same vlan and prevent them […]
7 CCIE Strategy Mistakes – What I will do differently next time!
Download the PDF here Although at the time of writing I have not yet passed the CCIE Lab Exam in Routing & Switching, but I wanted to write down my 7 CCIE Strategy Mistakes that I made on my journey so far. I have come a long way and have learnt a lot. My journey […]
How to read and understand the OSPF Database
Just a quick post to point you all over to a fantastic resource on How to Read and Understand the OSPF Database Written by Alfred Lumbis who I believe is a Cisco employee it goes through step by step what you need to do to fully understand the OSPF database Extract: OSPF, being a link-state […]
How much sleep do you need before the CCIE Lab Exam?
How much sleep do you need is a question I have never actually got an answer to. This question has become very important at this point in my life as I am studying for one of the hardest certifications in IT the ccie lab exam. The exam itself is 8 hours long so I will […]