CCP aka Cisco Configuration Professional

I've had a real dearth of posts lately, due to both inherent craziness at work, and a couple other projects that I'm working on.

The HomeLab business was dry for a few months, then picked up with a vengeance right at Christmas. I sold 7 configured Labs over a two week period, ending the very last day of the year. Now that everything is shipped, I can get back to the projects I've been working on.

One of the projects will be... sometimes I forget the title of the Blog, "CCNP or Bust". It probably seems to the outsider, that it's more Bust than CCNP, but because of the limited use of Cisco gear at my day/night job, having the CCNP is less of a driving force. Becoming a well rounded network engineer, is more of a concern with the MEF-CECP a much more desired certification where I work.

That said, I'll be back focusing on the CCNP between February and the end of March, with a desired completion date of March 27th. There is a good reason for this, so the posts will probably be coming in a flurry between the beginning of February and that date.

I likely will be trying to take Switch around the end of Feb. So as the kids say... "It's on like Donkey Kong"

I have a few toys coming as well. I have a Dell Precision workstation, a T3600, identical to the workstations we have at work arriving today. Only thing it's missing are the dual W7000 Video cards that they (for whatever reason) Spec'ed our systems with. It's a bit of an example of what it's like to work at a company in which most of the people, apparently, even our IT department, don't really have a good grasp on what we do. $1300 for dual 4GB video cards, but only 4Gb of system ram. One can only chuckle. I picked up the entire workstation, with 8GB of system ram, for likely, less than my company paid for ONE of the video cards in my workstation at work. I estimate we probably overspent around $30,000 on our workstations.
I picked this up to run ESXi vm's for various reasons, including the evaluation version of Cisco Unified Connection manager, eventually.

I also have two more Juniper SRX210's on the way to facilitate a focus on the JNCIA-ENT after the CCNP is finished. At some point, I'd like to get out of NOC work, and into a 9-5, Monday through Friday position. I don't mind dealing with the occasional emergency network situation, but after nearly 8 years of constant Fiber cut/Network outage management, it's beginning to wear on me.


That all said I do have a subject here, and it aligns with one of my other projects, to be named later...

Cisco Configuration Pro. Something one will have to have some experience with for some of the new CCNA tests, and likely the CCNP when a likely revamp of those come.

I've set it up seriously for the first time. I have an 1841 discovered and now a 3560.

There are a few simple configurations you will need to get a node discovered.

• interface configured on the network you have your PC running CCP on.
• username, privilege, and secret password for the device.
• VTY configured with priviledge, local login, and transport inputs set

and that's pretty much it

initial VRF configuration for the MPLS VPN training

Continuing on the MPLS studying with the addition of the VRF on the PE routers:

MPLS VPN OSPF BGP configuration practice

With my work being mostly based in MPLS, but from a mainly GUI use standpoint, I'm trying to gain a better overall understanding of MPLS configuration.

I don't have the Alcatel Gear to play with here, nor CLI config rights yet at work, so I'm working with the next best thing, practicing on what I do have, Cisco Gear.

I'm using Levent Okvur's walkthrough on YouTube:

So here is the simple MPLS setup I'm using:

Three 1841's, one as Provider Core, and two as Provider edge devices.
Four 1720's as the CE devices.

Config on one of the PE routers:

Well, I guess I'm an "Engineer" now...

My start date is today for my new position as "Engineer, Network Operation Center"

Some companies might call us Tier 3, and I'll be off the phones for the most part, unless it is a engineer to engineer conference, requiring more advanced troubleshooting. Going on Salary as well. Not sure how I feel about that. I'll have to see how they handle that.

Our Commercial NOC is growing from 40+ analysts, to upwards of 120, including the 12 engineers, that I am one of.

It's been a great experience coming from climbing poles, and outside plant to the logical side. I look forward to new and greater challenges.

Home Network Baller Status ?

Is home network "Baller" status achieved when your home router becomes a Juniper SRX210 ?
Sold the ADSL PIM out of it for $100, making it a net $285.00 purchase, which is a pretty good deal for one of the SRX210high memory versions.

Racks in, Racks out. I was getting a bit worried, but it appears that the U.S. must have a large percentage of people on the same payday weeks. About exactly 2 weeks from the last time I cleaned out my stocks, I'm almost cleaned out again.

Sold 5 systems over the last few days. Configuring what I have left to be a pretty nice rack for the Labkeeper.net/Packetlife.net Beta.

Upgraded a few of the XM routers I have left to have the ability to run 12.4T and IPV6 and advanced security features like Zone Based Firewalls. 192/48 is required.

A Few 2651xm Routers old Boot Roms

Now with upgraded Boot Rom allowing 256 mb of NVRAM

Rack Cam back running

Rack cam as living proof that I am, in fact, still studying for my CCNP. Big changes coming at work, and I might actually need it now.

Working HSRP labs tonight. If you watch the switches, you might even see ports changing status...

But if you are watching my switches to see if they change status, you probably need some help...and not the lab rack kind.

;-)

Carrier Ethernet rack coming along... Working on Radius Authentication to become a part of Packetlife.net's LabKeeper.net beta testing.

Picked up my second ADVA to almost complete my Carrier Ethernet NID acquisitions. I'll probably try to pick up a Cisco ME3400 as well, but those end up costing nearly as much as the Junipers do.

I should be able to do some simulations and practice what we preach at work soon.

The one on top is an FSPCCf-825 with 4 x 10/100 copper access ports, 1 x gig copper access port, 1 x gig fiber access port, and two copper and two fiber network ports.

The one on the bottom is an FSP 150CC ge-206 and is all fiber with six access and two network ports.

ADVA's are made in Germany, and the quality shows.

Working hard on CCNP switch study to hopefully test for SWITCH by the end of the month.

I'm working on getting at least one lab live on the labkeeper.net system that Packetlife.net Author, Jeremy Stretch has put together. It's an amazing bit of work he's done, and should allow us to get racks out to people to use much easier. Might kill my business, but I was never really in this to make a killing, just help pay for my own racks. Hopefully, soon, I'll be a busy network engineer and have no time for the business anyway.

Cable building day... and New racks for sale

I tend to dread these days.

I don't know if it's flashbacks to my BICSI commercial cabling days, or if I'm just lazy, but I hate building cables.

With the selling of my semi-custom CCNA and CCNP racks, I have to build quite a few of them, especially when I use 2509/11 RJ access servers.

These ones do end up pretty aesthetically pleasing though. I don't think anyone is selling racks this complete on Ebay.

Visual Switch Manager

While working some labs, I came across something I didn't really know existed. I probably should have, but just never really considered it.

Set a username, and password, and voila :

GUI for a 3560.

Who says Cisco isn't into SDN. lol.

Using the SmartPorts feature is interesting. Look at the config it performs when you select a role of router connection for port 0/1:

And then role Desktop/Phone:

And then the factory reset/reload autoconfig once I finished playing with it:

Network Monitoring - MRTG PRTG

Trying both MRTG and PRTG for network monitoring.

I've used MRTG quite a bit in the past(we now use Nagios, SevOne and Splunk), so have that set up first.

Installation was pretty easy, d/l and install perl ActiveState, and MRTG, build your cfg files, and set it to run as a Daemon.

Playing around with PRTG now. Much more involved "sales" process, and although I think they thought they were dumbing it down, it's actually more of a hassle to setup.

Routerz...

a couple 1841's trickled in.

Cleaning physically and logically.

Router#copy flash:c1841-adventerprisek9-mz.124-24.T1.bin tftp
Address or name of remote host []? 192.168.1.99
Destination filename [c1841-adventerprisek9-mz.124-24.T1.bin]?
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40494348 bytes copied in 156.916 secs (258064 bytes/sec)

Beginning of the year and back to the grindstone...

Now that I've got that other big certificate out of the way, (BBA Management, Mcoy School of Business, Texas State) and have taken four short months to stare at the wall and figure out where to go next, I'm ready to dive back into the Cisco Cert path.

I worked crazy hours this last pay period to try to get us as caught up financially from my 3 months of short-term disability, and a full racing season. Adios Pig Pen, you were a blast last year. Pig Pen is the Black, 4 wheeled, money pit in the Pics at the left.

I'm setting the end of June as a finish date for the CCNP, starting semi-from scratch. I've already got a remotely accessible(2509 access server) 5 router, 3 switch, all purchased off of ebay, and upgraded where needed to run the IOS needed. I actually was pretty thrifty and have built the lab for right around $1k, and have a few routers not in the lab(3640, and a 2610)

As it sits, I have:

2 x 2620xm with 256mb ram, and 48mb flash., 1 WIC1-T, 1 WIC-1DSU-T1 
1x 2621xm with 128mb ram, and 32mb flash
2x 2650 with 128mb ram and 32mb flash, 1 with 1 WIC1-T, 1 WIC-1DSU-T1, 1 with NM8-AS(frame relay switch)
3x 2950 catalyst switches
1 2509 with an Ethernet tranceiver for network access server duties.

I'm thinking of making some videos for youtube on how I assembled all of this as there isn't a whole lot of info on how to get this type of home lab up and running. You can see a pic of the current state of the rack in the slideshow at left.

To those that haven't run across it, and don't have access to Visio, I've found the Online Software as a Service Giffy, that does a great job with network representations. I'll be making one of each of the lab topologies that are used in the CBT Nuggets CCNP Videos. So far I have the EIGRP basic configuration, and the first of the Advanced EIGRP config done, with Frame relay setup.

I'll also be posting the configs of all my routers in the topologies when the lab is completed, so anyone can see how I did it. Just found out today there is a more modern way to set up the Frame relay router/switch using the connect command instead of Frame relay route, so I wiped all the devices and started over.

that's about where I'm at now. I watched the vids quite a while ago and wrote everything down on paper and am now transcribing them as I hit each section in the Cisco Press book.

Tips of the Day:

Putty Connection manager: When you are going to wipe configs it's awesome to be able to do it on all routers with one command entry. That and just having all the routers up in tabs makes it pretty convenient.

Gliffy: keeps what you have in the lab in your head if you are using a live setup.(which I highly recommend)

The Cisco Learning Network: The discussion groups are worth their weight in gold, and being free, don't empty your pocket of any.

Books by Todd Lammle: He just has a knack for ordering things in a book in the way that ends up most useful for learning. I just picked up his CCNA IOS Command Survival guide to remember how to change confreg on a new router I picked up(one of the reasons to use a live lab), and am already finding other uses for it.

Good luck to all, and I hope this is useful to someone.