CCNP Recertification

Posted on Friday, 18th August 2006 by sean

Often network folk have to make quick estimates without benefit of calculators, measuring tapes, or other handy things. I was thinking about this the other day, and thought I’d post some of the techniques I use.
- I’m 6′ tall, so my armspan is about 6′. Great for measuring the length of cables
- One [...]

Posted in General | Comments (2)

Posted on Thursday, 17th August 2006 by sean

I just got back from passing 642-811. Even though I ended up with a 962 the number of questions that I thought “I think that’s the right answer” would have made me think my score would have been lower (though as I go back and check, it looks like I was right on most)
Compared [...]

Posted in Reviews, Switching | Comments (1)

Posted on Tuesday, 15th August 2006 by sean

The CCNP track is being updated. Have a look at the new CCNP prep centre: http://www.cisco.com/go/prep-ccnp
Press release: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060815/20060815005343.html?.v=1
Summary of the changes (from the prep centre)
642-821 BCRAN becomes 642-825 ISCW Implementing Secure Converged WANS:
Security, DSL and MPLS added
642-831 CIT becomes 642-845 ONT Optimized Converged Cisco Networks:
QoS and WAN added
642-801 BSCI becomes 642-901 BSCI [...]

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Posted on Tuesday, 11th July 2006 by sean

Implementation of multicast, at least for the purposes of the CCNP BCMSN exam, is pretty simple. Cisco has the Multicast Quick-Start Configuration Guide which goes over many different ways of doing it.
The exam seems to only care about Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM), which uses the router’s routing table to determine whether or not a [...]

Posted in Routing, Switching | Comments (1)

Posted on Monday, 10th July 2006 by sean

I labbed up some Multicast stuff a while ago and only now am sitting down to write it. I’d like to write BCMSN by the end of the month because I’m taking two weeks off at the beginning of August where I won’t be near the Internet (or my routers) too often.
What is multicast?
Multicast [...]

Posted in Switching | Comments (0)

Posted on Thursday, 8th June 2006 by sean

Just a note while I come up for air…
On most switches with a hardware priority queue (egress expedite queue) like the 3550, it’s statically assigned to queue 4 (on switches with 4 queues). Some switches like the 4500s let you switch the queue, but generally it’s on silicon so you’re stuck. No problem.
However, [...]

Posted in General, Switching | Comments (1)

Posted on Sunday, 14th May 2006 by sean

As promised, here’s some posts from other network blogs that were submitted (some people submitted their site instead of an article, so I picked one). In no particular order:
Understanding OSPF Default Route Generation
Récupère les infos de tes routeurs Cisco avec un super script TCL (Retrieve information about Cisco routers with a super TCL script [...]

Posted in Roundup | Comments (2)

Posted on Thursday, 11th May 2006 by sean

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time dealing with Quality of Service (QoS) for voice, so this article will be an introduction to the topic.
QoS involves giving better treatment to some traffic at the expense of others. It’s not going to make any more data fit on the pipe, it just tries to [...]

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Posted on Sunday, 7th May 2006 by sean

I was going through my feeds this morning and realized I’m up to 4 other Cisco related blogs (see sidebar), not to mention a few other blogs that occasionally post networking related stuff. This is great! I’ve learned a lot of great tips by reading these blogs, and through my own writing, have [...]

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Posted on Sunday, 16th April 2006 by sean

Multilink PPP is an add on to PPP encapsulation that lets you bond multiple links into one. It can be used over asynchronous dialup to bond multiple modem or ISDN connections, or to bond multiple synchronous serial lines such as T1s.

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