Labbing in iTerm

In case you’ve not worked it out yet, I’m an enthusiastic Mac user.  I’ve used them on and off since I met my wife (a long-time and even more passionate Mac user) back in 2000 when she was running OS 9 on a Graphite iMac.  Despite negative initial impressions (“Ugh! Macs?”), she didn’t kick me out of her house and we got married 2 years later.

But I digress…  I’m running OS X Lion on a Macbook Air now and it’s easily my favourite computing environment.  I’ve also recently added an external screen (a Dell 22″ U2212HM) to try and prevent neckache from working on the laptop all the while.  I’m also trying (insofar as I can on the Mac) to replicate the CCIE lab environment.  From what I’ve seen on the web this roughly means:

• No tabbed terminals.
• Single 23″ display only.
• Work with electronic documentation, not hard copy.

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Testing Multicast

As it’s been a couple of years since I last had to configure multicast, I decided to give it a quick spin in the lab this evening.  There’s plenty of other sites and resources out there for configuring PIM-SM, either with static RP (Rendezvous Point) or by using Auto-RP (proprietary) or Bootstrap Router (BSR – standards-based), so I’m not going to cover that ground here – see the references at the end of this post.

Instead, I want to focus on tools you can use to test multicast from host-to-host via your lab network.  Yes you can use the old standby of:

R5(config-if)#ip igmp join-group 239.1.1.1

and then ping the multicast group address from another router – but where’s the fun in that?  Fortunately there’s some good tools out there you can use to good effect for testing this kind of thing – and there’s two in particular that I’ve been using today – emcast and mnc.

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CCIE R&S Reading List

As I was finishing up my CCNP a couple of months back, I started to put some serious considerations as to what certification I wanted to attempt next.  One option was to go for CCIE R&S and it didn’t take me long to decide that was what I wanted to do. The technical challenge and career benefits made it a very simple choice for me!

As virtually everyone in the industry knows, the CCIE certification is based on a day-long practical examination held at various Cisco facilities worldwide. In order to take that exam, you first have to pass the CCIE written test – a qualification exam to ensure that those sitting the lab exam really do know the theory behind the practice.  While I’ve not taken this exam yet, general consensus seems to be that while it isn’t particularly difficult or require über-deep knowledge, it is very broad in what it expects the candidate to know.

Sure enough, consulting the CCIE R&S v4.0 Blueprint (login/registration required) shows the breadth of material required. All the major enterprise IPv4 and IPv6 IGPs are there, together with BGP.  Layer 2 topics include Spanning Tree and Frame Relay, with MPLS being a new addition.  Multicast, QoS, Security and Network Services round out the technical topics quite nicely.

Obviously to learn all these topics to the required level of detail is going to take more than a single book and I’ve done a fair bit of research into what people recommend as reading material for the CCIE written exam. I’ve included this information here in the hope that it’ll be useful to those looking to take this exam soon.

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