got some rack time in

I managed to get about 6 hours of solid rack time in today. I started at the beginning of the authorized self study guide and worked through all of the chapter labs. I’m pretty solid on EIGRP, OSPF, BGP, and redistribution as far as BSCI is concerned. I forgot where to place a summary address in IS-IS and had to look that up really quick. Aside from that, I was pretty solid.

When I got to multicast, I ended up taking a 15-20 minute breather to find a multicast traffic generator for Windows. After a quick google search, I settled on LiveCaster. It’s an MP3 streaming utility, and gives you some decent options for configuring your streams, and advertising with SDP/SAP. I’m still shaky on multicast, but getting to actually work through the labs today helped solidify a few things.

I am going to finish putting the rest of my section notes into word docs this week, go back over the multicast videos from trainsignal, and try to sit the exam again by thursday/friday.

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is-is notes

I have taken a ton of notes from the Authorized Self Study Guide and from the Trainsignal videos. I think I’m at about 50 or so pages between the two sources. As an extra review, I’ve been working on moving my written notes to word docs. I already did that with OSPF and EIGRP (although I’ve updated my own doc files since I posted the originals). I just finished my IS-IS notes, and I’m getting started on BGP, redistribution, and multicast.

I am attaching my isis notes to this post. At some point, I’ll probably create a single post that I will attach all of my notes to. I’d like to take some time to add some small lab scenarios to my notes with config snippets, as well. I think that helps to solidify things and gives me additional visio/configuration practice.

isis1.doc

braindumps

Braindumps and companies like testking, pass4sure, and actual tests have been around since I started taking certification exams in ’99. I was always under the impression that they degraded the quality of the certifications and the amount of work that people put into their certs. There have been two threads on testking over at groupstudy in the last two days, and not one person has said anything about it. I’m curious as to why.

For those that do read this blog, what are your thoughts on this type of thing?

Trainsignal BGP

I made it through the four videos on BGP from Trainsignal yesterday. I think the total length of that section was about 4 and a half hours. WOW. Those videos covered a LOT more on BGP than either of the books I’ve read. I was really surprised to see that I was missing/lacking that much on BGP. Hopefully that will help increase my scores on the BGP section on my next BSCI attempt.
If I can wake myself up a little bit, I am going to start the multicast videos this afternoon. I’ll spend some time doing labs over this weekend and try to make another attempt at the exam next week. I’m starting to get nervous about taking it again. blah. I have a ton of notes on IPv6, IS-IS and BGP that I need to throw into word docs/outlines and get posted. having those notes for OSPF and EIGRP helped me a lot. I need to focus on getting that stuff all into electronic format for my own study purposes.

studies

My wife managed to keep the kids out of the bedroom long enough for me to get through the IPv6, IS-IS, and Route Map/VLSM/NAT videos from Trainsignal yesterday. I still don’t understand how I did so poorly on the IS-IS section of the BSCI exam two weeks ago. I knew EVERYTHING covered in that video.

I learned some stuff in the IPv6 video that I didn’t know, but I’m still a bit foggy on the 6to4 tunneling. I am going to go back through the authorized self study chapter on IPv6 tonight and see if I can solidify that topic for myself. If I can make it through the multicast sections today/tomorrow and redistribution by Tuesday, then I am going to try and schedule my re-take of the exam for late this week. If not, I’m going to give myself next weekend and take the exam next Monday.

I’m disappointed. I REALLY wanted to be well on my way to knocking BCMSN out of the way by now. I guess I’m just going to have to push harder to get this stuff done.

quick update

I haven’t done a bit of studying since I failed that exam a week ago. I wanted to jump right back on the horse, this week, and get to studying my weak points (IPv6, IS-IS, and multicast). My wife and both of my daughters came down with the flu last weekend, and I’ve been fighting it all week. On top of that, I’ve been dealing with bursitis and cellulitis in my left arm/elbow.
We’ve also stepped up our effort to re-IP our entire corporate network, and made some changes to the WAN this week. Needless to say, there’s been a little too much going on to really focus on any studies. I was eligible to take the exam again yesterday. I will try to take it again in the next week or so.

I spent a good chunk of time last night into this morning messing around with dynamips on my work provided laptop. It’s a Pentium M 1.6Ghz machine with 1 gig RAM. I was trying to do labs using 2621XM as the platform, and I couldn’t get more than two routers loaded w/o crashing dynamips. I moved to 3640’s with two different IOS images this weekend (ip plus for BBR and FRSW, and Enterprise for the pod routers). So far, I’m able to get all routers fired up without spiking the processors. I started loading configs on the FRSW and the BBR’s this morning and the CPU spiked. We’ll see how the laptop handles full configs.
I know I have the rack here, but I don’t get a whole lot of time to dedicate to it, unfortunately. I’m almost at the point of selling it off just to buy a decent home PC/Mac and a laptop.