Shawn Moore's Cisco Trek

QoS Policing and Configuration

2012-01-31T17:06:00.001-06:00

Well I'm nearing the end of the very last chapter of CVoice and after this week everything I study will be review until the test date which I haven't scheduled quite yet. I still have about 20 hours worth of CVoice video material I'm going to go through along with a review guide along with my Mnemosyne before I schedule the test and plunk down $150 bucks.

The last chapter was QoS Policing and configuration which wasn't quite as dreadful as I thought it was going to be. I think that's mainly because there's not a lot of detail you can put into 1-2 chapters compared to the previous CCVP which had a whole book and exam dedicated towards it! The picture above shows one of the token bucket configurations used in CIR (Committed information Rate) when trying to manage/police data traffic sent from CPE to the LEC.

There have been a lack of updates on the blog due to the crazy dead lines and traveling that I've been doing as of late. Sometimes I don't really get to study until 8pm or so which leaves me a dead tired (too lazy) to post a topic. I'm still at it though and I plan on keeping at the pace I'm at throughout the rest of this year unless life happens, which it usually does.

About Ready to take the CVoice Test

2012-01-22T19:53:00.000-06:00

I'm away from home still so I haven't been able to study like I want; however I've been watching IPExpert videos and finishing up the last few chapters in the Cvoice book. When I get home next week, I will finish up the last QoS chapter, and then start reviewing preparing on my first take on my path to CCNP: Voice

Configuring Digit Manipulation

2012-01-07T16:42:00.003-06:00

Spent about 3-4 hours labbing many different call routing scenarios and testing out as many technologies as I can. Along with cleaning up and configuring some high availability scenarios between both my HQ and Branch site in case the WAN goes down. I also setup correct caller-id information over PSTN so instead of just sending out the extension CLID (Caller-id) info it prefixes the area code and CO code as well.

Tomorrow will be another long session, going to deep dive into TEHO, site-codes, Toll-Free Bypass, and if I have time basic over of Class of Restriction (COR) but I'm betting I'll be worn out by time I get to that section.

I want to knock out the rest of this chapter before my employer ships me out to Houston, TX to begin provisioning our new remote DR site. I'll be out there for at least two weeks and I'm afraid I'm going to loose momentum if I can't get good lab time in so I want to get to the upcoming theory chapters ASAP. Thankfully I'll have plenty of IPExpert videos to go through and if I time it right I should be able to complete the Gatekeeper and first QoS chapter while I'm away.

70 Hours Completed

2012-01-04T18:35:00.002-06:00

Well I think I finally put in at least 60 hours total studying over the past 5-6 weeks. I'll probably be about ready to sit for this test about 60 more hours in. I'm 450 pages into my CVoice book currently on Chapter 5 and I went through at least 10 hours worth of training videos so really I probably put about 70 hours in. I finally received the IPExpert videos so I'm going to go through those and try to lab what I can with the exercises they provide. I went through the older CBTNuggets material and a lot of Kevin Wallace material. I'm also still creating and going through my Mnemosyne's, I have over 115 flash card questions now.

My current phone network is about 80% complete, I can call from one site to the other via the WAN but not the PSTN yet. Also I haven't configured my branch site to make calls through the PSTN but everything is good on the HQ and the PSTN (plus vice versa). I'll be testing and throwing up voice translation profiles/rules on my branch router tomorrow. Voice Translations always give me a headache looking at the syntax ever since I first encountered them in CCNA: Voice. I'm going to be diving deep into this until I can wrap my head around the common regular expressions:

My IP Phones are Finally Alive!

2011-12-29T19:13:00.001-06:00

I finally configured basic DN's for my IP Phones on both my HQ and my Branch router. I also configured a simple VoIP dial-peer so that I can place calls between the two sites. I can even dial my analog phone at the HQ site from all of IP Phone too without any issues. I'll be wrapping up Chapter 3 in the CVoice book by this weekend and then it's on to the Dial Plan chapters. I'll be configuring my PSTN router to emulate the PSTN finally as well. I'm estimating that I'm about 50 hours deep into my studies so far. Probably another 70 hours or so in and I'll probably be at the point were I'm prepping to sit for my first ever Cisco Professional level exam!

Two Weeks of HE Double Hockey Sticks!

2011-12-26T18:31:00.002-06:00

Well about halfway into my studies for CVoice, it hit me that I didn't have near enough flash memory (only had 64MB) to install both IOS 15 and CME 8.x. So I went on a long, I mean long hunt to find Compact Flash that would work with my routers. I even contacted a Cisco Engineer Manager in my local area to see if there was any official memory I could borrow but with no luck. I needed at least 256MB, I went to at least 3 different local chains like Target and Best Buy but they just don't sell CPFlash any more.

I searched my office some more and found a decommisioned router that actually had a 1 GB CPFlash SanDisk card in it but the tab to eject the flash card was broke so I used a flat head screw driver and pretty much destroyed the card when I finally got it out. I finally hit eBay and plunked down a little money and I was able to to get two 256MB cards that actually worked!

I spent my entire study session today (3 hours) getting the new flash cards installed with IOS 15 along with CME 8.0 and very basic phone info. I of course hit a few snags but it wasn't too horrible now that I'm looking back on it. I didn't want to go to far in the book without getting CME configured so I spent a lot of my days catching up on CVoice videos I had which helped re-enforce a lot of the topics I've learned so far. I of course did my Mnemosyne's as well. If you look above you'll see a successfully registered 7940 phone.

CME Overview and Basic Lab Configuration

2011-12-18T14:42:00.000-06:00

I went over the first dozen pages that gave a very high level overview of CME. I spent most of my time prepping my CCNP: Voice lab with basic network configuration. I created the voice/data vlan's, assigned IP's, configured router-on-a-stick, DHCP, and etc. I also spent a lot of time figuring out how I'm going to get CME onto my routers. I don't have near enough flash so I'm going to go ahead and see if I can purchase some at a local store. 64MB just won't cut it, especially when the IOS version 15 takes up 50MB alone! I have most of the bare bones configuration I need so once I have the flash installing CME 8.x will be a breeze...hopefully.

CVoice Chapter 2 Complete

2011-12-17T13:18:00.003-06:00

I knocked out Chapter 2 today and I'm already almost at the half way mark in the book. The first two chapters presents a lot of theory so it makes since as to why they're probably the longest. This chapter dived into the voice signaling protocols along with some examples of how to use them. The hardest part to digest in this chapter was the fax theory (it always is). Never the less it's time to start digging into CME again finally starting in Chapter 3. I created my Mnemosyne's for chapter 2 as well so I knocked out quite a bit just today.

Mnemosyne's and Chapter Completion

2011-12-06T17:48:00.001-06:00

I finished CVoice chapter 1 along with the review questions, I only missed one question and honestly I think it was worded poorly...oh well. I forgot about this flash card tool called Mnemosyne's, I decided to start creating flash cards for every chapter I finish. This is something quick and easy I can study while at work during any short breaks or downtime I have. I'm 160 pages in, Chapter 2 begins tomorrow!

Crossed the 100 page Marker in CVoice

2011-12-04T13:29:00.001-06:00

I knocked out about 30 pages in the CVoice book today. The topics covered the various types of controller configurations using T1's, E1's, BRI's, and PRI's. I also went over a brief overview of Echo and Echo cancellation. There were a bunch of examples of different controller scenarios and I attempted to tackle as many as I could. For some reason I didn't have BRI commands available on my routers but that's alright as I doubt I ever use this in the real world. Once all was said and done, I threw back on the original configuration and placed my test calls. The next section dives into DSP's, I'm 128 pages in so far, the book is a little over 600.

Traditional Call Signalling Overview

2011-11-30T18:00:00.001-06:00

I was only able to get an hour in of study this evening due to performing some after hours work on our CUCM. I'm going to be enabling dependency records so that I know what ties to what. For example knowing what configurations depend on a specific device pool or calling search space (css). I'm wanting to get rid of our call configuration for one of our remote sites that's been shut down months ago but I had a lot of troubles figuring out what was tied to what.

I eventually went up the hierarchy in my head of how you configure things in CUCM from what little knowledge I have. I removed everything from the regions, locations, device pools, etc for this site but there's still two css's that I can't figure out what's calling out to it. I'm also going to provision some of the region settings for our new remote site since configuring regions can drop calls currently in progress.

I was able to knock out about 10 pages today along with jotting notes down about the signaling types related to Supervisory, Addressing, and Informational. I left off going over the various E&M signaling from immediate start, wink-start, delay start and the different Types I-V used with Supervisory signaling. I won't be studying tomorrow as I will be doing an after hours upgrade on our Unity Connection servers. There's a good chance I may not study Friday as well depending on how much I want to have a social night that night!

Much Better Study Session!

2011-11-29T18:21:00.001-06:00

Thanks to the help of a co-worker I was able to resolve the issues I was having with my PRI configurations. I knew it was something to do with clocking but I was just too annoyed to research it yesterday. Apparently there's a command called isdn protocol-emulate that is used to make a Cisco router emulate as the CPE or as PSTN switch basically. I threw this on my router I'm using to emulate the PSTN (go figure) and did away with the T1 CAS's and provisioned them back as PRI ISDN lines. Sure enough the circuits came right up without any issues.

After messing with that and placing test calls, debugs, and etc. I was able to knock out 18 pages in the CVoice book, way better progress than yesterday. I'm also going through old CBTNugget videos on CVoice as there's some good refreshers on traditional telephony. My plan is to listen to one of the videos first thing in the morning time permitting. We're about to bring up our new remote site so I'm going to be knee deep in configuring Cisco devices and creating the dial plan in CUCM. This should be some good experience, we also plan on doing some clustering over the WAN by bringing up a CUCM subscriber at this new site, also good experience!

Horrible Study Session

2011-11-28T19:16:00.001-06:00

So to start off with, yesterday I made some decent progress. I knocked out about 30 pages of reading yesterday along with buying two cheap analog phones to test out POTS dial-peers using the PSTN. Today however was a complete mess, I wouldn't say I didn't learn anything but I made it through 1/2 a page of reading! The rest was spent troubleshooting Layer1 and 2 issues with just about every WIC card I had. From the FXS card that wasn't compatible with the Cisco 2821's all the way to ISDN layer two issues with my PRI configuration.

I gave up on PRI for now and went to T1 CAS but even that gave me a lot of issues. I spent an hour trying to get one analog phone to talk to each other, something that should be rather simple. I eventually got one end to call the other but not the other way around. It took another twenty minutes to figure out that the E&M signaling type was mismatched on both ends. Somehow I blew out my entire T1 configuration on both ends (I was frustrated to say the least) and spent another hour getting the configurations just right so that the routers were able to match dial-peer configurations to their respective ports.

I pretty much wasted 3 hours on a simple configuration but I guess in the end I gained some troubleshooting experience. I just 10 minutes ago was able to make a call to both analog phones from both sites. I'm using the PSTN router as my remote site for now since I don't have a 2800 compatible spare FXS card or a spare $150 to purchase one. I'm 43 pages in to the book so far, I'm hoping to make up for lost progress tomorrow.

CCNP Voice Home Lab Nearly Completed

2011-11-26T18:23:00.001-06:00

I retrieved most of the items on the list that I talked about yesterday, the last thing I really need for the CVoice is an analog phone. I'm thinking that I can go to Radio Shack or Walmart and buy a cheap $10 analog phone without any bells or whistles. I attached a picture above of how it looks physically, it's not the cleanest looking but it should get the job done. I had some weird issues with the HQ 2821 router not booting the startup-config. after being annoyed for 30 minutes, I looked it up online and somehow the registry setting was set to skip the NVRAM during boot-up. My guess is that this was the router I had to use password-recovery and I just forgot to change the settings back, either way it took all of 30 seconds to fix the issue.

I also read 13 pages in the CVoice book and wrote down notes between the differences of the four call-signaling protocols H.323, SIP, MGCP, and SCCP. I attached a picture above of my lab setup, there's still an analog phone and a dedicated VMWare server for the unified applications that I'm missing. I'll start putting together the VMWare server after I pass CVoice unless for some reason I absolutely need it, I don't see this happening though.

Setting up the CCNP Voice Lab Progess

2011-11-25T13:18:00.001-06:00

My first day in of fully committing to the CCNP Voice certification is off to a great start. I'm building my home CCNP: Voice lab based on a modified version of Kevin Wallace's Voice lab design. The modified version is pictured above, I may add an extra switch for the branch site and an extra IP phone if needed; I also may add an extra branch site. I still need the following to complete the home lab and then I'll snap a few pictures of my final design for this certification:

1 T1 cross over cable (PSTN router to branch office router)
3 Cisco IP Phones (Maybe 4 if I decide to borrow an additional switch)
1 IP Phone Power Brick (There's no PoE on the Cisco 28XX Gig ports)
2 Seven foot long Ethernet cables (For the HQ IP Phones)
1 Analog Phone (Hoping I can borrow this from someone)

I spent an hour or so setting up the physical equipment, cables, and basic network configuration. The longest part was provisioning the T1 controllers for the pseudo PSTN network using PRI connections. The HQ router didn't even see the VWIC card it had to configure it. After a quick Google search it jogged my memory of the card-type command and specifying if it was going to be a T1 or E1 controller. I'm surprised that I was able to configure the PRI ports all from memory, very good start to this long journey ahead.

I also went ahead and started my Safari Book subscription once again and read the pre-face for the new CCNP CVoice book by Kevin Wallace. I'm so glad that there's FINALLY material to study for this certification. I upgraded both Cisco 2821 routers to IOS 15.x already and I've downloaded a few different CME 8.x versions and a COP file for CUCM 8.0 for the later tracks. I'll proabably wait until around chapter 3 in the CVoice book to actually start installing and configuring CME but we'll see how impatient and anxious I get before hand.

I'm going to use the following web link: http://blog.ine.com/2009/01/18/configuring-a-pstn-dialplan/ for a general idea on setting up the PSTN router. I'm pretty sure that the Cisco 1760 that I'm using will be more than efficient for this job.What's going to make it or break it for me through this certification will be how much I can stick to a study plan, consistency is going to be the key I think. I'm wanting to get 16 hours in a week of study time. Two hours on the weekdays and Three hours on the weekends, I'm going to use a timer to keep me on task and of course lots and lots of Coffee!

1ExamAMonth and More Studying

2011-11-22T11:26:00.001-06:00

I went through about 25 pages on additional Presence design along with viewing a few CCNP: Voice videos regarding basic dial peer configuration on 1examamonth.com. It was all just review really from CCNA:Voice material, I'll keep going through the free videos on the website and I may purchase or see if my company can purchase the full training videos. I'm also looking at the IPExpert training videos but they're twice as expensive.

CUPS (Presence)

2011-11-21T11:13:00.001-06:00

I went over about 30 pages in the SRND Guide regarding presence and best design practices. I have a little over 250 pages to go until I move onto the actual certification books and start digging in into my home lab setup. I should be getting the second 2821 put together later this afternoon and I think I should be all set. I'll borrow a few Cisco IP Phones from work and maybe buy a cheap analog phone from the Goodwill or something. MY 1760's have a FXS/FXO cards already so I can always shuffle them around where needed.

Thousand Pages Read, 300 More Until GO Time!

2011-11-18T14:52:00.001-06:00

I finally crossed the 1,000 page mark in the CUCM 8 SRND guide (1356 pages total). I spent the last few days covering Unity and the design recommendations associated with it. As I near the end of the guide, I'm starting to finally acquire the hardware and plan out the materials I need for the CCNP: Voice. My company is letting me borrow two 2800 series routers loaded up with all the PVDM's and VWIC's I would ever need. I might need to buy another FXO/FXS card though.

I plan on using one Cisco 2821 (pictured above) as a Voice Gateway for the HQ and the other for the branch site. I'm going to use one of the 1760's as the PSTN network hopefully, and maybe the other for a 3rd branch site. I'm thinking I can get through CVoice cert without the dedicated ESXi server loaded up with CUCM, Unity, Presence, and maybe UCCX. It seems that CVoice focuses more on the gateway's and CME (Call Manager Express).

I would love to hear any suggestions or recommendations about this lab setup, it's hard to find other people going for the new updated cert since there's not a lot of material for it like the CCNP: R&S.

CUBAC

2011-11-12T20:23:00.001-06:00

I studied up on CUBAC which is short for Cisco Unified Business Attendant Console is an application designed specifically for receptionist to answer and dispatch calls. This requires a standalone server for the application itself and then integration with CUCM using CTI, AXL API and the Cisco TSP driver for call control. We currently use this in my work environment, when it works it's flawless but it likes to flake out every once awhile. 9 times out of 10 when there's issue with the program, simply logging the receptionist completely off attendant console and back on resolves whatever issue there is.

Music on Hold SRND

2011-11-06T19:30:00.001-06:00

I'm currently going through the best practices section regarding music on hold (MoH) using unicast, multicast, or both to stream audio media. This section also covers best practices depending on your network environment, such as competently centralized VoIP network, multi-site network with centralized call processing, our multi-site network with multiple clusters.

In my current work environment we currently use unicast for MoH and our environment has centralized call processing with multiple remote sites. We actually used to use multicast for MoH because it's obviously more efficient but we ran into a Cisco Call Manager bug with our previous version 7.x. We have since upgraded to 8.X but whatever TAC engineer we were working with recommended unicast over multicast when possible. Seems as if the SRND says otherwise, again for obvious reasons.

Cisco Unified CM and LDAP Connectivity

2011-11-03T12:57:00.000-05:00

I spent the last few days reading the SRND chapter regarding CUCM and synching with LDAP. This is what we currently do in our environment since upgrading from 6.x to 8.x. Before we synchronized with our AD environment, it was a very manual and painful experience adding or changing user accounts in the phone system. Especially when we would provision new remote sites. It also makes administrating all of the different unified communication components alot easier since there is pretty much a single log in for all of our equipment. We even had security consultants come in and configure our ACS device to synch with AD so that we could log into all of network devices with our single Windows Account login, very efficient!

Inter Cluster Trunks (ICT)

2011-10-30T21:41:00.001-05:00

I'm currently reading through the section regarding inter cluster trunks in the SRND guide. More specifically H.323 and SIP trunks between Unified CM Clusters. Nothing to detailed and pretty high level overview on recommendations regarding ICT's directly between clusters or using a Gatekeeper. I also went over high availability, load balancing, and the newer features that CUCM 8.x offers. I'm still drawing up what my CCNP: Voice lab is going to be or even if I decide to go for the cert still. VoIP is growing so fast and there's a multitude of different vendors out there, especially with SIP, it's hard to imagine spending 1k-3k for a very vendor specific certification. We'll see though

UPoE - Universal Power over Ethernet

2011-10-12T14:22:00.001-05:00

I was able to listen in on a webcast regarding the new UPoE and I decided to take a few notes, I've written them below:

UPoE is setup to currently provide up to 60W of power for many types of devices rather than just phones. We're talking about PC monitors, Thin Clients, even LED lights.

Power over Ethernet has had the following time line so far

7W of Inline Power beginning in 2000
15W of PoE beginning in 2003
30W of PoE+ beginning in 2007
60W of UPoE beginning in 2011

I didn't know this but RJ-45 is a universal socket, this is the only type of connecter that is used by the entire world.
UPoE uses all 4 Ethernet wire pairs with 15W running through each pair for a total of 60W. It should be noted that data WILL work just fine using UPoE over the Ethernet cable.
To determine safety with the new UPoE technology. A test was conducted using a bundle of 100 cables with maximum UPoE power sent through them. They were able to determine that there are no dangers of handling this additional wattage over the Ethernet cable. Also the heating temperature only increased by 10 degrees when comparing the 15W bundle with the 60W bundle.
CDP is used by Cisco devices for power negotiation while non-Cisco devices use LLDP

Configure the Network CCNA Lab Scenarios is now FREE

2011-10-01T13:45:00.004-05:00

I'm now giving away my CCNA Lab Scenario book away for free from this point forward, just click the link to the right to download the entire eBook!

Cisco Briefing Bytes - New Cisco 4500 Life Cycle

2011-09-20T10:50:00.003-05:00

This morning I was able to attend a small conference regarding the future for the Cisco 4500 platform along with the present. The 4500 series currently comes in 3 flavors, small (4503), medium (4507), and big (4510). Below I'll highlight briefly what I've learned and what I thought of the presentation.

Presentation:
The presentation was in a small conference room at my local Cisco office featuring models of all the latest and greatest offerings from the Unified Communications world. Our presenter was very knowledgeable, it was only me and two other guys who attended but the questions we shot to him he was able to handle with out skipping a beat. The presentation was the perfect amount of length for the product, 30-45 minutes long with Q&A time.

4500 New Features:
There are a ton of new features but I'll quickly list what caught my attention below:

Software WLAN Controller using a Supervisor Slot
Supervisors now use Dual Core CPU's
Internal VRF's (Allows multiple independent routing tables to be created) up to 64
Energywise Power Management
UPoE (Universal PoE) 60 Watts per port to power not only phones but also other network, computer equipment that are becoming PoE enabled such as monitors, Thin Clients, etc

Software:
4500 will use the new IOS-XE for its operating system, it sits on top of a Linux Kernel which allows it to take advantage of the dual core CPU and allows separate software to be run. WireShark comes installed by default and allows packet capture for not only the Control Plane but for also the Data. Also new to the new chassis and supervisors is the VSS (Virtual Switching System) that behaves very similar to HSRP on routers in which there's one IP to manage multiple switches in an active active state. the endpoint isn't aware that there are 2 or more physical switches and only sees it as one; this allows for very High Availability.

Current Capabilities:
The presenter went over things the current 4500 chassis can do, in our case we use 1 WS-4510-E. There's a feature called ISSU that allows upgrades on the Supervisors without having to physically reload the chassis or Sup which causes downtime. Something else I had no idea about is what's called EEM which is a built in editor that seems to be pretty feature rich. There's even a GUI that can be used for the editor.

Licensing:
Like everything else that's moving to the new version 15 IOS, the new IOS has every feature set installed but you're unable to use them until you license them. By default the 4500 IOS comes with LAN Base but in order to enable IP services you'll have to purchase a license to turn on the IP Base features.

The New CCNP: Voice Certification is Expensive...For Me

2011-09-18T14:14:00.000-05:00

Now that I'm preparing to deep dive into the CCNP: Voice track, I'm in the very early stages of figuring out what hardware, software, etc I'll need to get through the entire exam. At the very minimum I'll need to cough up at least $2,000-3,000 dollars I think. Sadly when I put together my CCNA: Voice lab before the new update I used all equipment that isn't compatible with the new version 8.x that Cisco is currently on. I have a few 1760 routers and possibly even some VWIC's and some other stuff that I might not be able to reuse. I should of done better research of the long term and what will be needed.

Oh well lesson learned, I'm going to either borrow equipment from work or purchase a few 2801's and a beefy PC to through all the Cisco Software on in a VM environment. I need a new PC any ways, it's about 4-5 years old lol. I can obtain IP phones for both Type-A and Type-B easily, my work laptop for Presence testing and other random things. I'll need to buy some cheap analog phones which is simple and other random things. I'm going to go off of this good diagram which is a HQ, one branch, and a PSTN router for external calls. If absolutely needed I'll buy equipment to make a 2nd branch office. Hopefully this will get me through everything. I'm estimating about 18 months of study time give or take. Cisco changes certification requirements so much that if I'm going to tackle this I need to start now rather than later. It would suck to get 3/4 through the CCNP: Voice and have to start over due to an update to the track.

User Input on Type-A and Type-B Phones

2011-09-14T08:40:00.001-05:00

The SRND guide describes to types of phones which are the group of phones known as Type-A and the other group known as Type-B. Type-A phones consist mainly of the older and less power phone types such as the 7912's, 7940's, and 7960's. The Type-B phones are mainly the newer models such as 7941's and 7942's. The way you dial phone numbers vary by the phone type and the the protocol used (SCCP or SIP). Cisco phones connected to CUCM are basically dumb terminals that really on the CUCM to control them.

What's interesting is that user input when dialing numbers using SCCP on the Type-A phones relays a signalling event to CUCM every time a key is pressed. Which results in CUCM sending feedback regarding the buttons pressed in real time such as dial tone, ring back, etc. However when you're using SIP on Type-A phones, all user input events are stored until the user press the # key or Dial softkey. This is similar to cell phones where you dial the entire phone number you would like to call and then hit the "send" button to place the call with the carrier.

Dial Plan Design

2011-09-10T19:58:00.004-05:00

I ran through most dial plan design recommendations today in the SRND guide. The example above show's the model that we've adopted due to the smaller size of our network environment.

Unified CM and CME Connectivity

2011-09-04T14:16:00.001-05:00

There are two primary ways to connect Cisco Unified CM systems and CME's between sites, that is H.323 or SIP. The primary focus in the SRND seems to be on the H.323 model which is deployed using either a Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) or what's called a via-zone gatekeeper. The important thing to note between CUCM and CME is that H.450 is used with CME for supplementary services but not with CUCM which can turn into dropped calls over a PSTN due to compatibility issues. I believe CUBE or a via-zone gatekeeper is used to mitigate these issues and act as the middle man. SRND is a pretty high-level document so a lot of things I read aren't going to really explain the reasons why or how. That's what's the CCNP: Voice books should provide for me...hopefully.

Gatekeeper Redundancy

2011-09-03T09:58:00.001-05:00

There seems to be two different options for gatekeeper design, clustering and directory gatekeeper (DGK). It looks as if the preferred method is clustering gatekeepers together rather than creating a DGK. Using gatekeeper clustering, you configure a local gatekeeper at each site but then you make redundant alternate connection other sites. This allows for the gatekeeper to provide primary call routing for the main site along with providing alternate call routing for other locations connected to it and vice versa.

DGK depends on the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) or by configuring multiple DGK's in your environment. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this particular way works a little more.

Call Processing Overview

2011-08-31T18:31:00.000-05:00

I'm on part 2 of the Unified CM SRND guide, it's a good 400 pages long so it's going to take me a while to finish this section. The last few days I went through 40 pages or so reading up on a high-level over view regarding the best ways to deploy Call Manager 8.x along with providing scalability, resiliency, and high speed performance. This is for all three flavors of Cisco Unified Communications:

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM)
Cisco Unified Communcations Manager Business Edition (CMBE)
Cisco Unified Communications Express (CME)

Unified CM Clustering over the WAN

2011-08-28T12:30:00.001-05:00

I went over yet another Cisco VoIP deployment model which involves configuring a CM cluster that is spread over multiple remote sites. So there is a subscriber and maybe a backup subscriber (depending on resiliency needed) at each site that is to be involved with the CM Cluster. With that you provide either local fail over or remote fail over. Local fail over provides the most resilience sense it implies that there's a subscriber and backup subscriber at each site. Remote fail over provides more flexibility since you are failing over to another remote sites CM subscriber server essentially instead of failing over to your own local subscriber. This model only requires one subscriber as well.

I also reviewed the section that discusses virtualization of all of these different deployment models using Unified Computing System (UCS) which is just all of the Cisco VoIP products deployed on a VMware system using Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as the media for communication between them all.

Intercompany Media Engine Architecture

2011-08-27T12:13:00.000-05:00

I had a quick study session this morning reading up more on a new feature to me called Cisco Intercompany Media Engine. I went over the call processing and how it uses IME compatible ASA's and Unified CM's to learn and place calls between enterprises. Along with our to fail over to PSTN in case of connectivity or latency issues. It's a pretty neat technology but I'm curious as to how many enterprises implement this solution currently.

Multisite Distributed VoIP Deployment

2011-08-21T12:54:00.000-05:00

I briefly went over the Multisite Distributed VoIP Deployment section in the SRND Guide. It has very similar attributes and requirements as the centralized model except it is a lot more versatile due to having a call processing cluster at each site. That eliminates the need to depend on the WAN or whatever media of inter-site connectivity for calls as much. I also began reading about the Cisco Intercompany Media Engine which seems to dynamically interconnect different enterprise organization phone numbers and create a network similar to how internet was when it was first created. Instead of just IP services, the network is used to connect Unified Communications within all the Enterprises. There's a lot more to learn about this technology and I may be off a little bit with my understanding of it at this point in time.

VoIP Site Based Design Models

2011-08-20T12:32:00.000-05:00

I spent sometime this morning reading through the various VoIP deployment models and how to implement high availability with each model while trying to get over this cold I currently have. So far I only went through the Campus model and the model that shows centralized call processing with multiple sites. In my current work environment we currently use the latter which is a centralized site that provides all the call processing which is then distributed to our multiple remote call centers. We're working on converting this into a more highly available solution which is a distributed model.

I plan on reading up on the other site based design guides that shows the distributed model along with a few others. I'm starting to see that there are multiple ways to provide redundancy using tools such as SRST (Survivable Remote Site Telephony), Distributed Communications Manager Express (CME), and many others.

Finally moving back to the VoIP World

2011-08-14T10:13:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted in a while but I finished up the TCP/IP Vol 1 book going through the subjects that I feel I needed to review before going back to VoIP. Mainly the interior routing protocols and overview regarding redistribution and basic static routing. This was all for making sure I had foundation for building on my VoIP knowledge to tackle the CCNP: Voice and maybe the CCIE: Voice. How can you sufficiently route voice over IP packets if you don't know how to route IP packets on its own?

I feel comfortable enough with IP routing to start diving deep into the Voice world and I have. It doesn't appear that the new CCNP: Voice reading material is quite done yet so I'm starting with Cisco Solution Reference Network Designs (SRND) material. These are really good free reading material providing best practices and design for all types of network solutions from security, voice, routing/switching, wireless, etc. Also moving to a new place leaves you pretty broke for a while and I know I'm going to have to drop some $$$ for additional lab equipment, books, and the 4 test to become CCNP: Voice certified. So I'm saving up money now while I scavenge the internet for free material!

I started with the Cisco 8.x CUCM SRND last week and I'm already at page 148 (1356 pages total) putting in about an hour of study a day.

Today I started on the security section for both the access layer and phone level. Talks about many basic things such as Man in the Middle Attacks, port security, disabling phone PC ports, etc. Tomorrow I'll read through material regarding Access Lists (ACLs) in a Unifed Communication environment.

End of the EIGRP Chapter (TCP/IP Vol I)

2011-07-19T18:38:00.000-05:00

I cruised through the EIGRP chapter which refreshed my memory on a bunch of topics that escaped me. Such as the default metric calculations used when calculating the best routes along with topics such as Feasible Successors, SIA (Stuck-in-Active), and k values. I went through the configuration exercises which were surprisingly not that complex considering the book is supposed to help prepare you for CCIE. All they asked were to configure 5 routers with EIGRP using the process-id 5, create a authentication key between router A and B, and summarize the routes as much as possible.

Tomorrow I'll knock out the troubleshooting section and report back on what that was like time permitting. This has been one of the most helpful chapters so far since we still use EIGRP in our network but not near as much since migrating to a different vendor which uses strictly BGP for connecting WAN's.

RIPv2 and EIGRP

2011-07-12T21:26:00.000-05:00

I briefly went through the RIPv2 review questions,configuration labs, and troubleshooting exercises over the last few days in the TCP/IP Vol 1 book. I also went through the basics and beginning of IGRP and how it moved to EIGRP. I will be spending the next week or so going through the this chapter so you may not see a post from me until then when I reach the configuration exercises. In other news I'll be moving soon so you really may not see a post until about 3 weeks or so due to the craziness going on right now!

RIPv1 TCP/IP Vol I Config Exercises

2011-07-03T19:21:00.000-05:00

Today's lab involved RIPv1, 6 routers, 2 switches, and 4 configuration tasks. All together the lab was around an hour. The first part was to simply configure the network for RIPv1, simple enough. It's nice not having to mess with static routes all over the place! The next task was make the serial link between RTC and RTD send unicast updates rather than broadcasts. I did this by configuring the serial interfaces as passive along with setting up RTC/RTD with neighbor commands.

Next up was too change how often RTC and RTD sent each other updates, this was done with the timer basic command. I picked some random timers and used the ? command to help me a little. I set this across the board on all 6 routers because from what I understand the timers have to be universal across the network in order to work., someone correct me if I'm wrong though. The last task was to prevent RTA from talking to the 192.168.4.0 network and RTB from talking to the 192.168.5.0 network. I used an access-list and the off-set command. I told both routers that on any incoming RIP update for the particular network listed in their access-list, set the hop count to 16 or invalid. 16 hops is considered an invalid/infinite route with RIP.

RIPv1Characteristics

2011-06-28T23:17:00.000-05:00

I went over the beginning pages in the Vol I book regarding the RIP version 1 protocol. There are some interesting things that should be noted about version 1 compared to version 2. I'll list what I remember:

1. Version 1 is a classful protocol rather than a classless protocol.
2. Since it's classful RIPv1 can become problematic when running the protocol over a discontiguous network.
3.RIPv1 pass the entire network class that it knows about when advertising routes rather than the specific subnet unless the subnet is directly connected. Again this points back to numero uno.
4. The only subnets it will list in the routing table are the subnets that's directly connected to the router.
5. RIPv1 assume any subnets that it knows about will be the same subnet size throughout the entire network. Variable subnetted networks could easily cause a lot of problems.

Finishing up TCP/IP Vol I Chapter 4

2011-06-26T15:07:00.000-05:00

I went ahead and tackled the rest of chapter 4 regarding dynamic routing protocols. Tomorrow I'll knock out the review questions and then it's time for part II of the book. Which is the meat and potatoes of what the book is about and I should have a lot more lab design, configuration, and troubleshooting which is what I need right now.

TCP/IP Vol I Chapter 4 - Dynamic Routing Protocol Overview

2011-06-25T11:47:00.000-05:00

I read through about 20 pages this morning regarding dynamic routing protocols and the basics of why and when they're used. Brushed up a little on my Split-Horizon understanding and how distance vector works. I know I know, it's kindergarten stuff I believe you need to have a thorough understanding of the fundamentals if you want to even think about going after the CCNP certs let alone the big bad CCIE. I plan on knocking 10-20 more pages out tomorrow and to have the chapter finished by next weekend depending on how much time I can spare.

Once I finish the TCP/IP book I'm going to begin drawing out my CCNP:Voice lab requirements and prepare myself to get ready to spend some $$$. I also plan on moving in August and hopefully adding a few simple mods to my car (I drive a Subaru WRX STI) so I probably won't be saving much over the next 3-6 months!

TCP/IP Vol I Troubleshooting Exercises Chapter 3

2011-06-23T20:56:00.000-05:00

This evening I briefly ran through some of the static route configuration exercises. I've been swamped at work lately, working 10-12 hour days seems to be the norm lately. I'm not progressing through this book as fast as I like because of being drained by the time I get home. We will be opening a new remote site soon so I'll be even busier, not to mention we're still knocking out the kinks from upgrading our entire Cisco phone system from version 6/7 to 8.5. There's a weird call transfer issue going on when internal users transfers a caller to another user through UCCX.

Basically a caller will call Internal User A, Internal User A will then put the caller on hold, dial a different UCCX CSQ Trigger (CTI Route Point) which then goes through a queue and then to Internal User B via a random CTI Port. Internal User A then attempts to transfer Internal User B but from the reports I receive about 85% of the time Internal User B receives a fast busy when Internal User A hits the transfer button on their phone. Any suggestions lol?

Quick Tip of the day, For those who have the same amount of trouble as me with stack switches booting in the right order. The easiest way is to boot the first switch you want as master completely, then connect the stack cable to the switch(switches) you want to be clients and power them on. Make sure that IOS MATCHES otherwise you'll more than likely run into version mismatch errors like no tomorrow.

TCP/IP Vol I Config Exercises 3-14

2011-06-20T18:48:00.000-05:00

I ran through the second configuration exercise in the TCP/IP Vol I book on chapter 3 this evening. For this lab there was a requirement to configure static routes on all routers with redundancy between each routers next-hop router. At first I thought that a floating static route would solve the issue but what I forgot is that none of the other routers would have a clue if a link went down since there wasn't a dynamic routing protocol involved. I simply took the floating static route out along with the AD (Administrative Distance) and added it back in without the AD. Now each router had a redundant route to each far end network and was load balanced using IP CEF. This solved my issue for the most part but I bet there are some ways that the packet can still not route correctly but I haven't dove to deep in all the possibilities.

The above picture shows router RTD with a path to RTB's far end network 172.16.7.0 /24 going through either RTA or RTC. RTA link is down due to a fiber cut so RTD took the route out of it's RIB and forwarded it towards RTC instead.

TCP/IP Vol I Config Exercises 3-13

2011-06-19T13:43:00.000-05:00

I spent about 2-3 hours this morning answering review questions for the TCP/IP Vol 1 Chapter 3 section regarding static routes. For now I'm skipping most of the IPv6 stuff, I'll circle around to it a little bit later during my CCNP: Voice studies. I finished off today's studying session by completing the 3-13 Configuration Exercise. This lab involved 6 routers, a bunch of discontiguous networks, and some summarized IP network configuration requirements thrown in for fun. Everything went pretty good, I'm starting to get in the groove again finally of setting up networks in GNS3.

Certification Path and TCP/IP Vol I

2011-06-12T12:08:00.003-05:00

I decided not to go and test for the CCNA: Security at this point in time. I believe at this point there's really no need but I did cover all of the material and took what I've learned and applied as much as I could in my current job role. Most likely I'm going to take a hiatus from taking any actual tests and prepare to go straight for the CCNP: Voice in about 9-12 months since that's the field I'm in and I already have a really good start.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to study at all though. On the weekends I spend about 1-3 hours going through the CCIE TCP/IP Vol I book, I need to have IP Fundamentals understood as much as possible. Today I labbed up a simple four router network using nothing but static routes. I've learned that specifying an exit interface (i.e. FastEthernet 0/0) rather than the next-hop router IP address with static routing could generate excessive trafﬁc on a broadcast network. The router uses ARP to query were the packet should be sent rather than just using the next-hop IP address defined in the static route. Below is to example static route configs along with the picture of the lab I worked on:

ip route 10.1.0.0 255.255.0.0 192.168.1.66 (Next-Hop IP Address, preferred method)

ip route 10.1.0.0 255.255.0.0 FastEthernet0/0 (Uses ARP/Broadcast, can be CPU Intensive)

Site-to-Site VPN's

2011-04-17T11:56:00.000-05:00

Recently at my company I was put in charge of configuring and deploying Cisco 881 routers and creating a Site-to-Site VPN's back to our ASA at the corporate office. I think this might have something to do with my co-workers knowing that I'm studying my CCNA: Security, oh well I didn't mind at all and kinda volunteered for this project. Well I wanted to learn about Site-to-Site VPN's through my IINS book before I started this project but the deployment happened before I could get to Chapter 4 and I'm really OCD about skipping chapters. In the end it worked out well because I think reading the chapter on Site-to-Site VPN's before ever configuring one beforehand would of just confused me.

I was able to open a TAC case to have an engineer help me get the bare bones configuration up. I then created a template and tweaked it to the point were all you have to do is change the IP's, allow the IP's on the ASA ACL, and create a static route and you were good to go. I was able to configure a group of 5 Cisco 881's in about 2 hours taking about 20 minutes each, the longest time was spent taking the packaging off of the router. The configuration took about 5 minutes.

This weekend I spent some time setting up a site-to-site configuration from scratch. For what ever reason I could never get the tunnel up and I quadruple checked the configuration including starting the lab over from scratch! It wasn't until I found some documentation that I realized why the tunnel never attempted to be created. The tunnel was only created when "interesting' traffic was sent to the other peer that's involved in the VPN process. I did a simple ping from end host to the other and just like magic the tunnels came right up!

A quick show crypto isakmp sa will show you rather your tunnel is up and alive:

Cisco SDM and ACLs

2011-03-20T10:46:00.000-05:00

The last week or so I have been reading through chapter 3 in the IINS book which covers access lists (ACLs) using both the CLI (command line interface) and SDM (Security Device Manager). Of course most of the configuration is based off of SDM but most people will use CLI in the real world including my self. I'm near the end of the chapter which digs into Zone-Based Policy Firewall which confuses me still to be honest. I understand the high level view of it which involves around creating zones with multiple interfaces/devices to be inspected with traffic instead of assigning a different ACL per interface which can become complex. I'm sure I'll have this concept nailed down within the next few months.

I'm actually putting some of this security stuff into use already which is nice, I've taken over configuring Cisco 880 routers with VPN connectivity for our home users. Also after our UCS upgrade, I plan on streamlining alot of our IOS configuration and implementing all of our Cisco devices with AAA using the ACS server that we have.

More Cisco SDM Stuff

2011-02-26T15:31:00.001-06:00

Well after 3 full days, I was able to get SDM up and working in GNS3. I know I've ran into issues in the pass but I wasn't smart enough to document how I resolved them really. This time I written down the exact configuration I need to have in order for SDM to run properly. You pretty much HAVE to install and use SDM if you plan on studying the CCNA: Security because most of the configuration you're going to do is based off of it. Today I was able to install AAA via SDM and some CLI which went fairly smooth. I had to setup AAA to user the routers AAA local user and password info since I don't have a RADIUS or TACACS server setup. This is good information though because we have a ACS server in our environment that uses AAA but only the older Cisco equipment is setup to use it as neither my colleague or myself are experienced in using it. We plan on beefing up and standardizing our network in the near future but we're just swamped with preparing for some very big network upgrades.

Role-Based CLI Configuration

2011-02-20T12:50:00.000-06:00

I spent sometime this morning playing around with different roles you can assign, similar to the privileged levels that you can assign for specific users in the IOS. I created a role called "simple" that only allowed for looking at the running configuration on the router and that's it. the show parser view shows what role/view you're in. The default "root" view is the only view that allows you to create other views...it's like a riddle I know but it makes sense once you play around with it.

I also learned how you can help prevent DoS attacks on the IOS itself. You can limit the amount of times someone can try to access a Cisco device within a certain time period. If someone attempts to login unsuccessfully within a certain amount of time, the IOS can block out any further attempts within a specified time period. As shown in the picture above, this command is called the login block-for and login quiet-mode.

Risk Management

2011-02-07T20:05:00.000-06:00

Today I read through more of chapter 1, it's one of the longest chapters I've ever read through in an IT book. I'm on page 91 with at least 10-20 more pages to go. I read up about basic risk management and the ways that you can analysis risk within a business. It's all about weighing the benefits between cost and security along with some guess work about if the risk will ever happen i.e. a tsunami hitting the middle of Missouri. I hope to have the rest of the chapter knocked out by tomorrow or Wednesday.

System Design Life Cycle

2011-02-06T13:25:00.000-06:00

This weekend I read through a good portion of Chapter 1 in the Cisco IINS book regarding the System Design Life Cycle (SDLC) and how to create a security policy. I played around with a low-level network scanner tool called Nmap. It's pretty cool, it can scan various things in your network such as UDP/TCP ports and can even graph a simple network topology out of it! I also played around with Cisco's security policy creator template which creates a ready to go security policy with pretty much everything you need. Starting this week I'm going to begin really digging into my studies work and weather permitting. I'm honestly not sure if I'll sit this exam but i do want to up my knowledge on security, even if it's just general knowledge.

Certification Plans

2011-01-16T13:06:00.000-06:00

Well I believe I have my plan laid out regarding which certs I'm going to pursue next. I'm hopping right into the CCNA:Security exam now, security is by far my weakest subject. After Security I'm going to most likely restart my CCNP studies again. I believe I would be doing myself a huge disservice if I didn't establish a solid fundamental understanding regarding IP networking and the protocols that's used to transport it. After that I might back track to CCDA or finally begin the new CCNP: Voice cert. I'm starting to realize in my current environment that troubleshooting and configuring networks is only one half of a solution. Properly designing the network to begin with will make or break a network. With an improperly designed network it can be hard to scale or troubleshoot the simplest of tasks.

Officially CCNA: Voice Certified!

2011-01-04T19:24:00.000-06:00

Woohoo...I haven't posted in a while but I've been doing some major reviewing along with tearing down and building up my home lab about 5-10 more times over the last 4 weeks. I took my test today and passed with quite a bit or margin compared to my CCNA exam. My worst section was the UC520 platform which I figured, there's just something wrong about trying to learn about information that's nothing more than a sales pitch.

Cisco Network Assistant

2010-12-12T11:38:00.001-06:00

Automatic Topology Creation via CDP

So today I've finally played around with Cisco Network Assistant which is essentially the same as the Cisco Configuration Assistant that's used to configure the UC500 device. For all the people studying for the CCNA:Voice, I'm sure you're well aware that Cisco Configuration Assistant is mentioned quite a bit during the UC500 chapter. It was good to get at least somewhat exposed to the software as I didn't want to shell out the money to buy a UC520 just to learn the few basics of configuring it.

Configuring Switch Port Settings through 2D GUI

I went through all the various tabs i could find and I will admit that it's a lot more feature rich than what i expected, especially if you're connecting a a compatible CCA Cisco device to it, such as the UC520. Tomorrow's lab will consist of configuring FXS connectivity using the following lab diagram:

Verifying FXS Connectivity Lab 5-1

I will say that the IP Telephony CME Labs are quite handy as it's teaching me different ways to manipulate the CME features in different environments.

Be careful of the IP Route command on a Switch Pt. II

2010-12-07T21:56:00.000-06:00

As I was making a frozen pizza (don't laugh!) it hit me that I believe the reason I couldn't ping any of the other VLAN's was because the ip route command turned my switch into a L3 capable device. I didn't tell my switch how to get to the other subnets via a static route/dynamic route since it was now basically a router as well. It could reach the router still because it was on the same subnet 10.1.0.0 /24.

I didn't have time to test this theory but I'm 90% positive this was the issue!

Be careful of the IP Route command on a Switch

2010-12-07T20:56:00.000-06:00

Well I decided to tear down my current voice lab and rebuild it as i work my way through the "IP Telephony Using CallManager Express Lab Portfolio" workbook. One of the labs I was working on required me to create RoAS (Router on A Stick) and I had everything configured and for some strange reason I couldn't ping between the other VLAN'S. This was due to having the ip route command configure by accident on my switch. I'll be honest and admit that I'm not quite sure how this effects routing quite yet, if you know feel free to leave a comment.

A colleague at my current job ran into the exact issue as he was making some IP address range changes on one of our remote sites. He was lucky and was able to have someone on site connect a console cable for him to connect back to the switch to remove the command. While all the devices stayed up he lost connectivity to the switch completely.

In other news I FINALLY scheduled my CCNA:Voice test for January 4th! I really need to pass on the first go round as the cut off date for IIUC is Febuary 28th and then it switches to the ICOMM series.

Creating Voip Dial Peers

2010-11-27T22:03:00.000-06:00

Well I figured I would make use of the extra T1 ports that I had on both my 1760 routers and create some voip dial-peers since I had the dial-peer pots working really well. While I have one T1 broken out as a simple CAS connection for making a PSTN type connection. I created the other one as a data T1 with IP addresses on each end to simulate a WAN network. Here's a small snippet of my 1760 that's acting as a remote router's running config:

This is configured to be a simple CAS T1
controller T1 0/0
framing esf
linecode b8zs
ds0-group 1 timeslots 24 type e&m-wink-start

This is configured to be a WAN T1 connection
controller T1 0/1
framing esf
linecode b8zs
channel-group 0 timeslots 1-24

This dial-peer is configured to send calls out of the CAS T1
dial-peer voice 1001 pots
description outbound calls to x1001
destination-pattern 915551001
port 0/0:1
forward-digits 4

This dial-peer is configured to send calls out of the WAN T1
dial-peer voice 8008 voip
description outbound calls to x1001 using IP
destination-pattern 915551001
translate-outgoing called 1
session target ipv4:69.1.1.1

Obviously I don't have both T1's up at the same time, I did this however to experiment with the different things that will happen depending on how the call is sent out of the gateway. This type of configuration will be useful for the CCNP:Voice I bet, I can have certain calls forward out through the WAN and others out of the PSTN. Or I can create some type of configuration in CUCM that'll allow for calls to be forwarded out of the PSTN if the WAN connection fails!

UCCX Holiday Scripting....Doh!

2010-11-26T10:04:00.000-06:00

My current employer is a medium sized call center with IPCC Express used for their contact center solution currently. I'm still learning my way around UCCX but I'm getting there, I can program basic scripts and troubleshoot basic issues. We use over 40 different queue scripts that all calls out to the same default holiday script. This script then points to a very simple XML file that lists calender dates that is edited with notepad. If the holiday condition is met, the original script then inputs the variable set (usually set to change to the "closed" setting).

There was one queue that was supposed to be open today (oops) so I had to create a duplicate script called "holiday_Alternate" that called out to a similar XML file except it didn't have today's date (11/26/2010) listed therefore the original queue script was set to open instead of closed.

Configured My First ASA this Week

2010-11-25T17:06:00.000-06:00

I configured my first ASA this week and what a mess it was! Oh well it was a good intro to getting hands on with some of the security side of things. When one of our remote sites was initially built, there wasn't any internet availability in the area due to it being in a more rural location. To remedy this, all internet traffic was delivered over our MPLS and then out of our corporate site to access any external website. Recently the area finally offered simple business DSL connectivity (that was more than enough for this location) and we asked for this service pretty quickly.

Well of course we didn't want to just connect a non-secure DSL connection to our network so we needed a simple firewall aka ASA 5505 to provide a buffer between our remote sites network and the outside world. Once all was said and done/configured it was actually pretty simple but I ran into many bumps along the way. The first thing was that the new ASA had NO configuration whatsoever on the device, not even the factory-default settings. The device was asking for a username and password which wasn't configured so after about 3 hours of mucking around I ended up finally getting in by using the ROMMON mode and changing the configuration register to 0x41. This tells the ASA to ignore the saved start-up configuration, from there I entered the command configure factory-default which put the right factory default settings on the device it should of had to begin with.

The only thing I could think of is that maybe they forgot to throw this command on the device before shipping it out lol. After that fiasco now I had to figure out to configure it finally! It wasn't to bad but I ran into some weird things mainly due to the silly DSL modem itself. The DSL provider configured the modem to work in "pass through" mode so it didn't do anything besides provide a bridge between the ISP and the ASA, it took me a while to realize that. So I had to battle NAT configuration, IP Addresses, and ASA port configuration.

What confused me the most was how I had to tell the ASA what it should and shouldn't know. The ASA had no problems reaching the internet or the internal network. However internal devices could only reach the ASA and not the external world, not even the ASA's outside interface. At first I thought this was due to access-lists I had configured. Turns out it was because NATing wasn't configured all the way and I hadn't specified the internal network IP range the ASA should know about.

I used ASDM and even a little CLI to finally get the thing working. Commands I'll never forget is the route inside and route outside which is similar to the ip route command used on routers and L3 switches.

CME Music On Hold

2010-11-21T21:17:00.000-06:00

Ever since I've read past the CCNA:Voice section regarding Music on Hold (MOH) I've been trying to get it working ever since. The problem I ran into is that I couldn't get MOH to work when I placed a call from one IP Phone to another in my internal network, just dead silence. After some research, apparently this a known issue depending on how you configure MOH. In order for this to work between IP Phones in your internal network, you're supposed to use multicast rather than the default method. Even with multicast configured and every option I could think of, I still couldn't get this working.

Well after completely forgetting about MOH and eventually setting up my remote network weeks later, I was reviewing a few CBT's when it hit me that MOH should work when putting external callers on hold. I placed a call to the analog phone on the remote network and then put them on hold, sure enough it worked! I will admit though that the quality wasn't great because I was using the G.729 codec across my WAN and I'm betting that this analog phone is at least 15 years old!

The Smart Business Communications System

2010-11-11T20:34:00.000-06:00

I finally knocked out the book for the CCNA:Voice this evening, the last two chapters were based on the Smart Business Communications System (SBCS). To be honest both chapters felt like one huge sales pitch but there was some useful information that I'm sure will be on the exam. As far as I understand, the SBCS suite is based around the Cisco UC500 product family and how they interconnect between each other.

The main player within the SBCS is the UC520 ISR which is pretty slick within itself, especially if you're a non-Cisco person. It enables you to have a router, firewall, POE switch, PBX, Wireless, and many other features within one small device. The UC520 itself seems fairly straightforward, especially with the web based GUI tool called Cisco Configuration Assistant (CCA). Now that I finish these last few chapters it's time to review over the next few weeks and then exam time!

Cisco Unity Express Hardware Limits

2010-11-01T17:11:00.002-05:00

It's important to know that you're limited with voice mail size limits based on the Cisco Unity Express hardware itself. Below I have listed the four different hardware size's and their limitations that I'm assuming will be on the exam:

Cisco Unity Express Advanced Integration Module (AIM-CUE)

50 mailboxes
14 hours of storage
4-6 ports for voice sessions depending on the router model

Cisco Unity Express Network Module (NM-CUE)

100 mailboxes
100 hours of storage
8 ports for voice sessions

Cisco Unity Express Network Module with Enhanced Capability (NM-CUE-EC)

250 mailboxes
300 hours of storage
16 ports for voice sessions

Cisco Unity Express Enhanced Network Module (NME-CUE)

250 mailboxes
300 hours of storage
24 ports for voice sessions

Complete Voice Network

2010-10-24T12:47:00.002-05:00

Today I wrapped up the last bit of configuration I needed to do to complete my CCNA:Voice lab setup (besides Unity Express). I am now able to place calls not only internally but also to my remote site via a PSTN connection. I have four more chapters to go and then it's time to review and prepare for the test. I want to take and pass the exam sooner than later because the certification is being completely revamped and I only have until February 28th to take to current version. I already feel pretty confident, especially after I was able to finally dig into dial-peers and the many ways you can manipulate them.

VoIP Trunking Protocols

2010-10-16T14:36:00.002-05:00

With most business that integrate VoIP into their network, they not use VoIP technology within their own LAN but also across WAN's to remote sites, other businesses, ISP's, etc. There are a few popular voice trunking protocols to pick from and I'm starting to learn the history and details behind each. There are four voice gateway protocols that I hear and see configured quite a bit in the voice networks I've seen so far.

1. H.323: This is a pretty mature and older voice protocol that was created primarily for connecting to other networks using the ISDN connection. This doesn't surprise me as I see this used mainly on PSTN connections to ISP's. While the protocol is pretty stable, there are a lot of features newer protocols handle better along with being easier to manage. When I run the debug command debug isdn q931 on a gateway, the information is usually pretty cryptic and hard to undertstand.

2. MGCP: I see this protocol used all the time in the Cisco VoIP networks, apparently Cisco is really the only vendor that uses this protocol even though it's an open standard. MGCP is a centralized based configuration.

3. SCCP: Again this is only on Cisco VoIP networks because this is Cisco's proprietary protocol. This protocol is used specifically for communication with Cisco IP Phones and other Cisco endpoints such as ATA's.

4. SIP: This is the new kid on the block and it's still being developed constantly. SIP is basically a lighter and more feature rich version of H.323. Except that it is based on VoIP instead of ISDN, it uses a lot of the same standards that HTTP uses which makes it a lot simpler to develop. I haven't touched SIP yet but I've heard a LOT about it. There's actually a forum that is very involved with this new protocol, check it out at www.sipforum.org

First Hands on With QoS

2010-10-03T12:15:00.002-05:00

As I dive deeper into the VoIP world, I'm starting to learn just how important QoS (Quality of Service) is in a network. QoS is a complicated topic and for good reason, not only because the configuration can be quite involved, but also their can be a lot of corporate politics involved. QoS comes into play when a network is congested, instead of having a router just drop random packets that it can't route you can prioritize which specific packets should be sent from most important to least important. With the least important being sent to the "bit bucket (gone forever)" most likely. With this said RTP voice traffic is very time sensitive, when there is latency it upsets the way it is sent to the receiving end and in turn usually upsets the end user as it can cause echoing, dropped calls, and a plethora of other issues.

You should prioritize voice and video traffic before other traffic in most environments...well unless the CEO steps in and demands that his e-mail and internet traffic is more important than any other traffic! There are essentially 3 steps to configuring QoS:

1. Identify and match packets with the class-map command
2. Prioritize traffic with the policy-map command
3. Assign the QoS policy to the impacted interface with the service-policy command

You can see a sample configuration in the picture above that I was messing around with in GNS3.

The Many CME Phone Features

2010-10-03T11:06:00.002-05:00

Over the last few weeks I've been reading and toying with the many different phone feature settings that you can configure through CME. While there are still many options I haven't covered quite yet such as Intercom, Music On Hold, and Paging, I've learned a lot about what you can do using the ephone commands on the CME gateway. By far the most confusing part for me has been the configuration of hunt groups and how to route and stop the calls within hunt groups and to other hunt groups. It's a lot easier to understand when you're looking at a full Call Manager GUI rather than from ephone-dn commands!

DHCP IP Exclusion Command

2010-09-19T20:04:00.004-05:00

As I was reading one of the CCNA:Voice chapters I noticed that my phones were picking up the wrong VLAN IP addresses. I spent hours and hours today working the issue until I realized what it was. My DHCP router has two dhcp pools to pick from when handing out IP address, one named VOICE for my IP phones (172.16.1.0 /24) and one named DATA (172.16.2.0 /24) for PC's and everything else simply enough. I like to exclude a small range of IP's from being handing out becuase you'll see this in most real world environments. So I excluded 10 IP's on both dhcp pools, 172.16.x.1 - 10 which allows me 20 IP addresses for servers, future routers, etc. Well what I didn't pay attention too was that I accidentally excluded the range 172.16.1.1 to 172.16.2.10 instead of this:

172.16.1.1 to 172.16.1.10 (10 spare IP's on the VOICE VLAN)
172.16.2.1 to 172.16.2.10 (10 spare IP's on the DATA VLAN)

I didn't notice that this was causing the issues because it was still handing out IP's but only from 172.16.2.11 on up obviously. Once I caught the error and typed this command:

ip dhcp excluded-address 172.16.2.1 172.16.2.10
ip dhcp excluded-address 172.16.1.1 172.16.1.10

Sure enough both phones picked up the right IP addresses, well after I restarted the phones from the voice router that is.

Internal VoIP Network

2010-09-12T12:21:00.003-05:00

I'm finally back from traveling and had some downtime to begin studying once again. I was able to finish setting up my internal VoIP network and I can place calls between both phones now. The configurations for the phone settings is done through the router CME using ephone commands. I assigned one phone extension 1001 and the other 2002. Once I get a little further in my studying I'm going to configure the T1 connections between my two 1760's to simulate placing calls to a remote site over a WAN link. I'm planning on taking the CCNA:Voice test before the end of the year so I can begin ramping up for the CCVP a little after April once I'm in my new place.

Uploading CME Files

2010-08-30T23:01:00.003-05:00

I spent most of this evening trying to upload the full featured Call Manager Express (CME) tar files to my Voice router. I was doing very well until I realized that I didn't have enough Flash memory to support the full version! Thankfully I was able to find the basic version which should be enough to get me through the studying and the test.

It was very time consuming deleting all the old files but I did learn a new command which I've never heard of, it's called the squeeze command. It's for sure one the weirdest command names in the Cisco IOS. Here's how it works, by default when you delete a file from flash, it really doesn't delete it rather it marks it as deleted so you're not gaining your flash memory space back by just typing the delete flash: command. The squeeze command however goes through the entire flash directory and removes any files marked as deleted, it works fairly well but is time consuming also.

Beginning The Setup of My Voice Network

2010-08-29T19:59:00.005-05:00

I've been really busy over the last few months with this one being the busiest with me working 16-22 hour days. This is due in part of me installing and bringing up new networks for a few of our remote sites that's growing in size. I'll be in St. Paul MN this Wednesday and won't be back until Tuesday of next week if all goes well. I finally had a little downtime to get some studying in. After about 1 month of researching and about $700 later I had purchased everything I needed for my CCNA: Voice lab.

After I plugged everything in I did some of the initial configuration based on the CBTNuggets CCNA: Voice videos. I ran into an issue that stumped me for a long time however which was due to none of my phones or PC was receiving an IP address from the DHCP server I configured on my 2620 router. It turns out that my 7960 and 7940 didn't like the simplified vlan configurations much on my switch.

I had the following configured at first:

switchport mode access
switchport access vlan 50
switchport access voice vlan 10

I had to change the configuration to the old way:

switchport trunk encap dot1q
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan 10,50
switchport access vlan 50

Once I added this all my devices starting picking up IP addresses. The only thing I can think of at this point is that maybe the older IP Phones don't accept the new way of switch vlan configuration but I'm sure I'm wrong and may be missing something.

Learning The Analog World

2010-08-15T19:25:00.004-05:00

Before I begin digging deep into the VoIP part of my studies I spent the last 3-4 weeks studying more about the PSTN world. Mainly how analog voice signals is converted into electric and eventually binary signals. This process is called Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) if your converting analog to electrical values and Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) when you're converting the PAM values to binary.

An engineer named Dr. Harry Nyquist noticed that human voice only uses between 20-9000 Hz. He figured out if you take samples of the voice signals at twice it's frequency rate, you can accurately send the signal over a medium and play it back without any noticeable sound distortion.

The problem with that if you sampled the highest frequency range that a human can reach (18,000 digital samples per second), it would require a lot of bandwidth for each voice call. To remedy this he lowered the frequency range to 4000 Hz (8,000 samples per second) since rarely do humans ever speak above this range and if they did it would probably be pretty annoying.

With that said, the 8000 sample rate per second plays nicely with the digital world. The rule states that each sample is 8 bits (1 Byte).

Therefore 8000 samples * 8 bits = 64,000 bps (64 kbps)

Does 64 kbps sound like a familar term you hear? It should as 64 kbps equals the same size as one ds0 channel in a T1. Remember a T1 has twenty four 64 kbps ds0 channels that makes up the entire T1 speed of 1.536 Mbps (24 * 64,000 bps = 1,536,000 bps) with T1 framing signaling the T1 size is actually 1.544 Mbps.

CCNA: Voice

2010-08-07T17:41:00.004-05:00

So I'm finally preparing for the voice certifications, I've been reading a lot of material over the last few months but I'm officially getting into study mode again. I started going through the CCNA Voice CBTNugget videos and taking notes along with ordering the CCNA:Voice study guide. I'm still finishing up pricing out my lab but I'm hoping to spend less than $800 total on it. I have phones I can use at work along with some other hardware probably so that should help. I'm going to use one of the lab guides from techexams.net to help determine what I do and don't need. I plan on going after the CCVP straight after that and then who knows maybe CCIE Voice!

I have to travel quite a bit for work over the next month so I probably won't really dig into my studies until the end of September hopefully.

Internal Router Switching

2010-07-10T18:07:00.004-05:00

Something that's over looked during CCNA/CCNP studies is the actual switching that's done on the router. Of course the switching a router does and the switching done on an actual switch is completely different. When speaking of switching on a router it deals with the process of forwarding a packet from one interface on the router to another interface on the same router. This process can be extremely CPU intensive for the router to do. However with the use of certain router switching tecnologies such as "Fast Switching" and Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) you can significanlty decrease the amount of work the router's CPU has to do.

In the lab I created, I told the internal router to ping the "website" router with 1000000 packets (to simulate traffic). While doing this I disabled CEF and Fast Switching note what happened below:

Note that each exclamation point means that the packet was successfully forwarded and that each period means that the packet was dropped. Looking near the end of the picture you can see when I disabled CEF and the packets were too processor intensive for the router to handle and queue so it started dropping packets to keep up with demand. For testing purposes I increased the packet size to help bog down the router so that you can see the example shown.

Configuring HSRP Protocol

2010-06-26T12:04:00.003-05:00

I spent a little time this morning learning about the HSRP (Hot Standby Router Protocol) and how to configure it in a real world environment. This is something that I might think about implementing in our networking system actually. It works by creating redundancy between two routers in case one router loses internet connectivity, the other router can take over. The configuration was rather simple and easy to understand. You're basically creating a virtual IP (VIP) that your internal network will use rather than the routers actual Ethernet IP address. I have including a sample configuration below:

Router_A#sh run int fa0/0
Building configuration...

Current configuration : 166 bytes
!
interface FastEthernet0/0
ip address 192.168.100.2 255.255.255.0 (actual IP address)
duplex auto
speed auto
standby ip 192.168.100.1 (VIP address configured on Router B as well)

standby preempt (Tells the router to try and become primary when circuit is back up)

standby track Serial0/0 10 (decrements HSRP priority, router with highest is primary router)

end

Creating GRE Tunnels

2010-06-20T11:54:00.002-05:00

Today was a pretty simple lab, I went through the configuration of GRE Tunnels between two different remote locations. GRE configuration is very simple and consists of the following commands on both device:

1. Create the logical tunnel interface on both remote devices:

interface tunnel X

2. Assign an IP address to the tunnel interface:
ip address X.X.X.X subnet mask

3. Point the tunnel towards the source interface:

tunnel source interface

4. Point the tunnel towards the destination interface:
tunnel destination X.X.X.X (remote device ip)

One thing to note when creating tunnels is that the remote destination must be in the routers ip table. That's about it though, you should see your tunnels come right up once everything is configured on both ends. Remember that GRE tunnels are unencrypted so it's best to route the tunnels through some type of security device such as an ASA or even a dedicated VPN concentrator.

Preventing Redistributed Routing Loops

2010-06-19T14:46:00.003-05:00

Today I ran over a quick lab of something you may experience in the real world, routing loops due to redistribution. As shown in the picture above, both the routers R1 and R2 are redistributing the same networks both ways. Because of Administrative Distance, each router would think the best route to EIGRP were through each others OSPF interfaces and vice versa which would cause a routing loop.

To circumvent this, I have created a route-map and assigned tags to both routing networks to prevent redistributed routes to be learned in both directions:

(Running Configurations on Both R1 and R2)
router eigrp 1
redistribute ospf 1 route-map OSPF-to-EIGRP
network 20.0.0.0
default-metric 100000 100 255 1 1500
no auto-summary
!
router ospf 1
log-adjacency-changes
redistribute eigrp 1 subnets route-map EIGRP-to-OSPF
network 10.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 area 0
default-metric 100
!
route-map EIGRP-to-OSPF deny 10
match tag 90
!
route-map EIGRP-to-OSPF permit 20
set tag 110
!
route-map OSPF-to-EIGRP deny 10
match tag 110
!
route-map OSPF-to-EIGRP permit 20
set tag 90

I'm going to be learning about GRE tunnels shortly as well, hopefully it isn't to complicated to grasp, VPN's and tunneling always confused me because I have a habit of over complicating things!

Lab Portfolio Case Study 1

2010-06-06T14:34:00.002-05:00

It took a while but I was able to finally finish the first case study presented in the CCNP Lab Portfolio book. I was rusty on a few topics but I was able to complete the following:

1. Enable EIGRP 1
2. Summarize the 5 loop back address on R2 (not presented in above image)
3. Inject a default route into the EIGRP network pointing towards R3
4. Configure OSPF between R3 and R4
5. Redistribute OSPF into the EIGRP network
6. Inject a default route into the OSPF network pointing towards R3
7. Configure DHCP on the R2 router in order for R3 to gain an IP address on its LAN (Fast Ethernet) interface.

All in all not to bad and it allowed me to brush up on the topics that I always forget! I'm digging pretty deep into my voice studies already. This morning I read through a lengthy overview on the history of Call Manager and VoIP in general. I'll probably finish that up by going through some white papers on IPCC along with the network warrior book.

IPv6 Challenge Lab

2010-06-04T11:49:00.002-05:00

I finished today's lab which was a challenge lab, which basically makes you configure the network without any instructions besides IP configuration information. I was able to complete all required tasks successfully which included:

1.Enabling IPv6 EUI-64 between the R3 and R4 routers 2.Enabling EIGRP without auto summarization 3.Creating a manual IPv6 tunnel between the R1 and R3 router 4. Enabling OSPFv3 on all routers using IPv6 (R1,R3,R4)

While I'm about finished with the portfolio book, I'm about to dig even deeper into voice shortly, especially IPCC for my new job. I also picked up the network warrior book and reallly wished I would of had this a year ago, it gives some very good information how a live network operates and what happens in the real world instead of just topics you see on the CCNA.

IPv6 6to4 Tunnels

2010-05-29T12:52:00.002-05:00

Today I configured another type of IPv6 tunnels used to alleviate the headaches of switching to an entirely different IP format in a network! It's called a 6to4 tunnel and it does exactly what the name says. It encapsulates a Ipv6 address within a IPv4 packet so that it can use the IPv6 address locally and still travel across a IPv4 network. Do to the nature of this type of tunnel, it doesn't need to be configured on both ends of the tunnel since it's not considered a point-to-point link. To configure a 6to4 tunnel I used this simple command:

First I configured the logical tunnel:

R1 (config)# interface tunnel 0
R1 (config-if)# tunnel mode ipv6ip 6to4
R1 (config-if)# ipv6 address ipv6 address
R1 (config-if)# tunnel source interface
R1 (config-if)# exit

Second I configured a static route to point towards my tunnel:

R1 (config)# ipv6 route ipv6 address tunnel 0

This tells the router to send this particular IPv6 address out tunnel 0 and tunnel 0 routes this interface out of the source interface.

Using IPv6 Tunnels

2010-05-24T11:33:00.002-05:00

Today's study session consisted of creating a Ipv6 Tunnel connection between two routers. OSPF IPv6 was also configured for the loopback interfaces on routers R1 and R3 to talk to each other. This lab was fairly straightforeward and allowed for me to play around with tunnel interfaces a little bit. I come across tunnel interfaces quite a bit in my current job role so it was good getting some practice in with configuring them even if they were IPv6 tunnels which aren't to common yet in most networks! My next IPv6 lab will be on configuring 6 to 4 tunnels which is a tunnel that allows you to encapsulate IPv6 address into a IPv4 packet to traverse over a network. This is particularly useful in networks that haven't migrated to IPv6 completely yet (which is most networks).

Configuring OSPF for IPv6

2010-05-23T11:57:00.002-05:00

I'm finally on the last chapter in the CCNP Portfolio book which covers IPv6 topics. Today's lab was dealt with configuring the many types of IPv6 address (link-local, EUI-64, etc). The lab ended with configuring OSPF over IPv6 along with a challenge lab. The challenge lab consisted of summarizing two IPv6 addresses over OSPF. All in all it was very straight foreword, when it comes to configuring IPv6 I noticed that it's very similar to it's older brother IPv4 except the order you place commands and the way you implement them on your router device. I was very surprised honestly that it worked over the switch as well, I figured the GNS3 switch wouldn't understand how to interpret the IPv6 address in its MAC table but I was wrong thankfully.

Multilinks Revisted

2010-05-22T12:10:00.003-05:00

So I wasn't able to work through one of my CCNP Portfolio labs this morning so I subsituted with something I deal with commonly..multilinks. I've posted on this topic before and it's really straight forward to configure. Basically your load-balancing data across all of your T1 links in a simple but effective manner. You do this through the use of the PPP protocol and a logical interface called a Multilink (go figure). Say you have a business that wants to use 3 Mb of data rather than the standard 1.5 Mb, you can take their 2 serial interfaces and bundle them into one with two simple commands:

ppp multilink
ppp multilink group

You also have to create the multilink interface and assign the multilink the designate IP address as shown above. Thanks to GNS3-labs and Evil Routers for today's lab.

Multicasting Dense Mode

2010-05-10T14:06:00.003-05:00

I spent a good part of my morning working my way through the second multicast lab in the CCNP portfolio book the best I could. Since I didn't have a real switch that could emulate SVI (I don't think) I had to use GNS3 the best I could for the IGMP snooping. Multicast is by far the hardest topic for me so far and I still don't understand it honestly. I know enough to get by but it's still very confusing and works differently then any of the routing protocols. I did understand a little more about how the multicast tree is built however using other routing protocols are RPF (reverse-path forwarding). this will for sure be a topic I'll have to spend extra time on understanding, tomorrow is another multicast lab using PIM sparse mode instead of dense mode.

BGP Policy Based Routing

2010-05-06T12:14:00.002-05:00

I had a lot of trouble with this lab and was very confused and overwhelmed quickly trying to get the BGP routes to traverse correctly through the main SanJose router. The SaneJose2 router was supposed to be the back T1 and all traffic coming in and out should only flow through the main SanJose router. While I was able to get mostly everything working, I had problems getting the local preference settings to work right and I had RIB failures on top of that in my routes which is never a good thing lol. I'll have to come back to this lab or work through some other BGP labs to figure out what I was missing or doing wrong.

BGP AS_PATH Attribute

2010-05-05T11:36:00.002-05:00

I've been working through the BGP section in the CCNP Lab Portfolio book over the past week. This morning I went over a short lab regarding the AS_PATH Attribute. It's kind of strange that the BGP labs have been the shortest labs so far, you would've thought BGP would of been a pretty big section.

As other people mentioned, this chapter has a lot of mistakes and it makes the configuration of the labs confusing. You don't know if it's you not configuring the routers right or the book giving the wrong information.

Even still I managed to get through this chapter which consisted of created a special BGP access list with the use of "regular expressions".

I configured the following regular expression access list on the ISP router:

ISP(config)#ip as-path access-list 1 deny ^100$
ISP(config)#ip as-path access-list 1 permit .*

ISP(config)#router bgp 300
ISP(config)#neighbor 172.24.1.18 filter-list 1 out

Tomorrow's BGP lab seems to be longer than the other labs so we'll see just how much material I'll have to work through. I shouldn't be able to finish a full BGP lab in 15 minutes...not yet anyways :)

DHCP Router Configuration

2010-04-30T13:36:00.003-05:00

I spent this morning reviewing DHCP router configuration and the many options that you have as a DHCP server. From what I've seen in real networks most routers won't utilize DHCP configuration unless it's for a smaller network using a Cisco 1841 or something similar. The bigger enterprise routers are usually deployed in bigger environments where there are already dedicated DHCP server(s) in place. I did learn a command that would of helped me tremendously during my CCNA studies.

To all the people studying for the CCNA try out this command on a router and you'll get a nice surprise:

Router# show ip port-map

Yup that's right, you get a complete list of the most common TCP and UDP ports used, very handy for the CCNA exam or just for a quick reference!

IS-iS over Frame Relay

2010-04-17T11:15:00.002-05:00

I knocked out the last of the IS IS topics in the CCNP Lab Portfolio finally. One interesting caveat about IS-IS and NBMA (Non-Broadcast Multi Access) networks is that it can only perform as point-to-point connections. Which is very different from OSPF that can use different NBMA technologies such as multi-point. Tomorrow I begin the different routing manipulation topics that's a HUGE part of the exam I hear.

CCNP Portfolio IS-IS Labs

2010-04-10T11:44:00.003-05:00

I'm about half way through the CCNP lab portfolio book finally. I started on the first IS-IS lab presented in the book and it refreshed my memory on a lot of the IS-IS topics which I can honestly say that I forgot. The lab was focused on the basics and the end goal was to setup an IS-iS lab where the core network was running as an IS-IS level 2 network. The other goal was to implement security measures to prevent rouge outside networks/routers from trying to create an adjacency to the current IS-IS network which was pretty straight forward. I plan on completing the IS IS portion of this book within the next week or two, I'm working overtime at the NOC this upcoming week so we'll see how far will get by this time next week rolls around!

Finished the OSPF CCNP Portfolio Labs

2010-04-06T15:35:00.004-05:00

All of this studying and labs (lots and lots of labs) are starting to pay off. I'm finally starting to grasp many of the CCNP routing topics without having to reference a book or look up how to configure certain commands. I went through the OSPF challenge lab and was able to knock it out in about 20 minutes which is pretty good. One thing about troubleshooting networks is that you can gain a lot of information just from looking at the running configurations and the ip routing table. Looking at the device log (show logging) helps you determine what happened and when, this is very helpful in real world environments. Next up is IS-IS and then the redistribution chapters which is gonna teach me a lot of new techniques I bet!

OSPF Over Frame Relay

2010-04-03T14:14:00.002-05:00

Today worked through the CCNP Portfolio lab 3-4 which has to do with OSPF over frame relay. This lab was mostly review for though. I did finally bit the bullet and learn how to setup a Cisco router as a frame-relay switch finally. I always used the frame relay icon in GNS3 for all of my frame relay studies. It was fairly straight forward, just mainly pointing the DLCI's where they need to go and configuring the serial interfaces for frame DCE connections was all that was needed really. I also went through some of the different type of OSPF NBMA topologies you can configure, such as point-to-multipoint or creating neighbor connections through the OSPF configuration.

CCNP OSPF lab Portfolio

2010-03-28T10:00:00.002-05:00

I finally finished up the EIGRP section and I'm now moving through some of the OSPF labs. Right now the labs are just going over basics but I have learned a few new things that I never thought about when it came to OSPF. When configuring loopbacks with IP addresses and using OSPF as your routing protocol, If their aren't any specific Router ID's (RID) set, OSPF will use the Loopback address as the RID.

For example if I configured the loopback 1 interface with the IP address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0, the router would use this as the RID as well. So when you run the show ip route command, it shows up as 192.168.1.1 /32 instead of the 192.168.1.1 /24 that you have actually configured on the lo1 interface. to circumvent this, you should type in the interface command ip ospf network point-to-point which tells the router to treat the loop back interface as routing destination rather than a routing ID.

Multicast Protocol Overview

2010-03-24T21:54:00.001-05:00

Multicasting enables data to be sent over networks to a group of destinations in the most efficient way. The data is sent from the source as one stream; this single data stream travels through the network. Other network devices only replicate the data through the network if they have other members on their interfaces that are apart of this destination group.

Multicast groups are identified by Class D IP addresses, which are in the range from 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255. Muticast uses the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) and Cisco Group Management Protocol (CGMP) for determining which network devices require the multicast data stream. Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) is used for determining the best way to route multicast traffic.

There are many differences between Multicast and Unicast packets. Unicast duplicates a packet for each reciever that it needs to send the data too (one copy for each reciver). Multicast sends one packet stream as mentioned previously, downstream routers replicate the packets only on links where receiving hosts exist. Multicast provides the following advantages over unicast:

Enhanced efficiency
Optimized Performance
Support for distributed applications

The disadvantage of multicast is that it uses UDP (User Datagram Protocol) as it's transport protocol. This means that packets are only sent on "best-effort" delivery and that packets aren't sent reliably. In order to cut down on unreliable packets, the multicast applications them selves may need to provide some sort of reliability mechanisms to prevent huge data lost. This could mean more processing power needed on the hosts them selves.

Shawn Moore invites you to follow my study progress at http://shawnmoorecisco.blogspot.com/. I also invite you to download my free CCNA eBook lab book at: http://www.configurethenetwork.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shawn_Moore

EIGRP Challenge Lab

2010-03-21T10:12:00.002-05:00

I did my best to get through all of the tasks for the EIGRP Challenge Lab but I was unable to complete two tasks because I wasn't sure what they we really wanting me to do. The first was to filter a specific network from advertising out of a routers interface. The other task was to filter a network from entering a routers interface. I wasn't sure if I was just supposed summarize the network or create access-lists, route-maps, etc to deny the traffic. Besides that I managed to finish every other task successfully.

I had to change EIGRP settings such as manual summarization, change hello timers, and implement MD5 authentication which was all pretty straight forward. The weirdest task preventing EIGRP from sending multicast updates between the neighbors R1 and R2 (As shown above). I think I figured it out by entering the following command under my EIGRP AS 1

Router 1
router eigrp 1
neighbor 172.16.12.2 s0/0

Router2
router eigrp 1
neighbor 172.16.12.1 s0/0

If any one has any better suggestions on how to limit multicast addresses or if my method was completely wrong, please let me know haha!

A Few Different CCNA Lab Simulation Options

2010-03-20T14:18:00.002-05:00

As all of us Cisco certified and future Cisco certified professionals know, the key to passing the CCNA is knowing your hands on configuration like the back of your hand. This presents a challenge to many of us who's budget is limited from buying the latest and greatest Cisco equipment that could cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars to create a decent lab!

Fortunately many simulation programs are out there to help replicate the hardware and software needed to pass the exam. Even newer to the Cisco world and in my opinion closer to the real thing is emulation software that uses the actual IOS to simulate working on a Cisco router.

Simulation programs provide a very affordable way to create labs to possibly pass the CCNA exam with the bare minimum requirements. There are many simulation programs to choose from. In particular you would want to look for something that has many different Cisco devices to play with along with being updates with the newest IOS commands.

This is something you should note because it's not uncommon for different IOS versions to use a slightly different set of commands to accomplish the same task. Before choosing a simulation program it is also valuable to note that you won't have access to every feature available with a real router and equipment so many commands will not be available to you.

There's also the option of using emulation software such as GNS3 which allows you to completely emulate a Cisco device without the actual hardware. You can also do cool things such as connect to a real Cisco device from the emulator program to help cut down on cost if you already have a few Cisco devices but not enough to create a full CCNA lab. There are a few downsides though as well. The main downside is that as of today, you aren't able to emulate Cisco Switches due to the way Cisco switch hardware works.

However emulators such as GNS3 has a simple Ethernet switch built in that you could use or you can connect your emulated network to an outside world to connect to your Cisco switches. The other downside is that you must have access to actual IOS images in order to use any of the emulator device. This can be particular hard to acquire unless you are a vendor or a CCIE with credentials to access these images from Cisco directly. There are many choices out there but always remember that nothing beats actual equipment and hardware!

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shawn_Moore

EIGRP Configured on a Frame Relay Network

2010-03-18T17:22:00.002-05:00

I spent a little time this afternoon going over the next EIGRP lab in the CCNP Lab Portfolio. I learned some useful types regarding EIGRP and how it works over Frame. For the most part you can configure EIGRP as normal but EIGRP works off of split-horizon rules. Split horizon pretty much tells a router not advertise a route out of the same interface that it learned the route from to begin with. There for in the diagram router West and East didn't know about each other due to not being able to advertise the same route back to HQ. To get past this, I had to turn of split horizon on the HQ router with the following command:

no ip split-horizon eigrp 1

Once I entered this command under the EIGRP configuration, sure enough all routes came right up!

EIGRP Configuration, Bandwidth, and Adjacencies

2010-03-11T22:19:00.002-06:00

I was able to tackle the second lab in the BSCI Lab Portfolio and I can already say with confidence that this book will help me greatly with my studies. I learned a few things between this lab and he first lab that I wouldn't of ever known or thought about. Last week was a very simple two router lab with basic static route configuration. However I learned something that I didn't even know these Cisco routers could do, and that's programming scripts. The Lab Portfolio goes over a neat little script that allows you to test ping configurations without having to go through and ping every interface over and over on each router to verify connectivity. Check out a preview of the script I used for the first lab below, it's called TCL Script and you can access it by typing the tclsh command when you are in enabled mode:

foreach address { 10.1.1.1 10.1.2.1 10.1.3.1 10.1.4.1 10.100.12.1 10.2.1.1 10.2.2.1 10.2.3.1 10.2.4.1 10.100.12.2 } { ping $address }

It pretty much says for each IP address listed, ping it, as simple as that!

I finished my first EIGRP lab today and picked up some cool new commands such as the ping ip address repeat number of times command. Which you can ping an IP address as many times as needed, an example would be ping 10.1.1.1 repeat 1000. This tells the router to ping 10.1.1.1 1000 times, great for testing experiments with routing protocols while packets are being sent across the network!.

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Route Reflectors For BGP

2010-03-05T10:42:00.005-06:00

BGP specifies that routes learned using Interior BGP should never be learned by other IBGP peers. Because of this rule, BGP requires that all IBGP networks to be complety fully meshed as shown in the picture above. Therefore if you had just 13 routers in your AS running IBGP, you would need 78 total connections in order for all 13 routers to connect to every other router! This causes a big problem with bandwidth due to sending redundant data across all of the routers at the same time.

To over come this, the creation of Route Reflectors (RR) were created. Route Reflectors allows an AS that's running IBGP to not have to use a complete full-mesh topology. Instead you can creat whats called clusters which can group sets of routers together. You can think of a cluster as a mini network that sits inside of your AS. But instead of a full-meshed topology, the cluster is designed in a hub and spoke fashion with one router being designated the Route Reflector (Hub) and the other routers being the spokes that connect to the RR. The Route Reflector then passes its updates to the AS, other clusters, or even other AS's depending on the configuration. This saves on the number of BGP TCP sessions that must be maintained and and also reduces the BGP routing traffic!

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BGP Communities

2010-03-01T10:39:00.003-06:00

If we used just prefix-lists and distribute lists to filter BGP updates it would be a very manual intensive job due to the size of most BGP networks and the fact that you would have to configure each router one at a time! Today I learned that you can group routers running BGP into groups that can share the same filtering information. Therefore you would only need to configure one of the routers in the group for all of the other routers to know what updates should be filtered and what shouldn't.

"BGP communities function allows routers to tag routes with an indicator (the community) and allows other routers to make decisions (filter) based on that tag. BGP communities are used for destinations (routes) that share some common properties and that, therefore, share common policies; routers, therefore, act on the community, rather than on individual routes. Communities are not restricted to one network or autonomous system, and they have no physical boundaries."

the community attribute is considered an optional transitive attribute. If a router receives an update with community attribute information but doesn't use that attribute, it will ignore it but pass it along to other BGP neighbor peers. The community attribute consists of 32-bits, 16 for the Autonomous System number (AS) and the other 16 identifies the community number.

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Creating Prefix-Lists for BGP Routing 2

2010-02-28T14:12:00.003-06:00

I spent this early afternoon finishing up the BSCI BGP Appendix section on prefix-lists for BGP, I mainly created a lab that specifies that that the network 172.30.0.0 /24 in the AS 65500 only shows as the supernet 172.0.0.0/8 in the AS 65000 BGP table as shown above. Tomorrow I will learn a little bit about BGP communities and go over what I've learned!

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