Posts from ‘CCIE SP’
IOS XR Ethernet Link Negotiation
With the growing popularity of our CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Rack Rentals, which include IOS XR, our support staff has been receiving an increasing number of trouble tickets where users are reporting physical connectivity problems of the IOS XR routers to their attached Ethernet switches. In 99% of these cases the problem doesn’t stem from physical layer 1 issues, but instead from a misunderstanding of how IOS XR link negotiation works, since it is different than most other platforms. While the fix for this problem is very simple, it’s one of those issues that can be incredibly frustrating for candidates learning IOS XR for the first time, since it’s really demotivating to not even be able to ping your directly connected layer 2 neighbor! 
First, let’s examine the problem.
XR1 is connected to SW1 via GigabitEthernet as follows:
You all made it by far the best Cisco Live that we’ve been to thus far. We wanted to put together a video to help remember the night, and say thank you for being such great, loyal customers. We will be doing a party of at least this same magnitude next year. I say magnitude because that’s probably the best way to describe the night. This wasn’t just some low budget wings-n-beer social, we had a sushi chef, a taco stand, and top-shelf drinks being served. We actually had to have them bring in more food at one point because more people showed than we had planned for. It was a truly magnanimous party. At the peak we had 247 people on that roof (capacity was 250 at any one time). People came and went all night – and all-in-all we had almost 500 people show up for our customer appreciation party. All of INE was there, and we truly enjoyed meeting each one of you face-to-face – something that we can’t always do online. We really cannot wait to see all of you, plus many new faces at our customer appreciation party at Cisco Live next year in Orlando. If you didn’t happen to make it this year in San Diego, we certainly hope you can make it out to our event next year in 2013. Who knows, we may even do this in London or Melbourne next year as well.
By the way, stay tuned as early next week we lay out our CCIE Data Center training strategy and rack rental plans!
Tags: ccie, cisco live, Customer Appreciation, data center, networkers, Party, San Diego
Edit: Full Scale Lab 4 is also now available.
A new update to INE’s CCIE Service Provider Lab Workbook Version 3.0 has been posted today, and is available to download from the INE Members’ Site. This update includes some minor typographical fixes to labs in the Technology Labs section, as well as a new Full Scale Lab 3. Two additional full scale labs will be posted within the next week or so which will bring the workbook to its completion. Right now the workbook is about 800 pages, so the final release will be somewhere around 1,000 pages.
Also congratulations to Daniel Wang, Jason Rowley, and Sangareddy M who recently passed the CCIE SPv3 Lab Exam! Here’s what they had to say about their experiences:
I passed my SP LAB at Cisco live 2012 last week. Without your outstanding workbook, video and online Rack, I couldn’t pass it at the first attempt within 3 month. It’s my third CCIE certificate, and I used your security workbook exclusively two years ago to clear my security track.
Kudos to all of you for excellent job.Best Regards,
Long(Daniel) Wang
CCIE #25434(RS/SEC/SP), VCP, ITIL Manager
I passed my lab on May 15. The CCIE-SP Advanced Technology Class videos were well put together and helpful in my preparation. The convenience of being able to watch on my laptop at home, my work pc, or on my ipad was awesome. Good job INE.
Jason Rowley
CCIE #35456
After 2 years of hardwork, I finally cleared my ccie service provider lab #35224 on my third attempt. I used latest v3.0 INE videos and old workbooks for my preparation. The videos presented by Brian are great/fantastic. He clearly explained on all the technologies with great examples. I strongly recommend latest ATCv3.0 videos for CCIE-SP preparation. It covers all the IOS-XR related information that is required to pass the exam. Thank you Brian/INE.
Sangareddy M
CCIE# 35224
Tomorrow I will be doing a vseminar on how to prepare for the R&S CCIE lab and Friday I will be doing another vseminar going over our new R&S CCIE Troubleshooting labs and racks along with a full lab walk-through. The first vseminar will last 4 or 5 hours and the second will last roughly 5 or 6 hours. If you would like to sign up for a session you can use the link below:
Before the official announcements goes out tomorrow, if anyone is attending Cisco Live in San Diego in two weeks and would like to attend our party on Monday night (11 June) at the Altitude Sky Lounge next to the convention center (free food, booze and drawings for iPads every 30 minutes) you can sign up using the link below:
Additionally we have space reserved at the convention center and are hosting four CCIE Troubleshooting sessions (two Wednesday and two Thursday). These sessions will last 3 hours each and we will be offering free R&S CCIE Troubleshooting Labs using our new 32 device topology with automated grading. We are giving away an iPad per session to the person who completes the troubleshooting lab with the highest score and fastest time. These new labs will be made available to the public for purchase after Cisco Live. There is extremely limited seating for the troubleshooting sessions so sign up now if interested using the form below. For the INE party we have space for a few hundred people but hurry up and get there early before Brian McGahan eats all of the sushi! 
Update: Congrats to Mark, our winner of 100 rack rental tokens for the first correct answer, that XR2 is missing a BGP router-id. In regular IOS, a router-id is chosen based on the highest Loopback interface. If there is no Loopback interface the highest IP address of all up/up interfaces is chosen. In the case of IOS XR however, the router-id will not be chosen from a physical link. It will only be chosen from the highest Loopback interface, or from the manual router-id command. Per the Cisco documentation:
For BGP sessions between neighbors to be established, BGP must be assigned a router ID. The router ID is sent to BGP peers in the OPEN message when a BGP session is established.
BGP attempts to obtain a router ID in the following ways (in order of preference):
- By means of the address configured using the bgp router-id command in router configuration mode.
- By using the highest IPv4 address on a loopback interface in the system if the router is booted with saved loopback address configuration.
- By using the primary IPv4 address of the first loopback address that gets configured if there are not any in the saved configuration.
If none of these methods for obtaining a router ID succeeds, BGP does not have a router ID and cannot establish any peering sessions with BGP neighbors. In such an instance, an error message is entered in the system log, and the show bgp summary command displays a router ID of 0.0.0.0.
After BGP has obtained a router ID, it continues to use it even if a better router ID becomes available. This usage avoids unnecessary flapping for all BGP sessions. However, if the router ID currently in use becomes invalid (because the interface goes down or its configuration is changed), BGP selects a new router ID (using the rules described) and all established peering sessions are reset.
Since XR2 in this case does not have a Loopback configured, the BGP process cannot initialize. The kicker with this problem is that the documentation states that when this problem occurs you should see that “an error message is entered in the system log”, however in this case a Syslog was not generated about the error. At least this is the last time this problem will bite me
Tags: ios xr, mpls l3vpn
CCIE SPv3 Rack Rentals – which include IOS XR – are now out of beta and available for normal scheduling via the INE Members’ Site. The rack topology is based on our CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Lab Workbook and the CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Advanced Technologies Class.
Currently each session costs 20 tokens, and each session is 3 hours long. If you purchase tokens in bulk this basically means that SPv3 rack time is around $3 per hour. Token based sessions start on Monday May 7th. People who booked beta sessions before this time (i.e. through Sunday) will still maintain their free sessions. Anyone who booked a beta session on Monday May 7th or later has had your session removed. You can of course add them back through the scheduler, but the sessions are no longer free to book after the end of this weekend.
A brief video on how to use the new scheduling system and SPv3 Rack Rentals is available here.
We’re continuing to add functionality to the new scheduler and its control panel, which includes choosing a config to pre-load before a session starts via the control panel, remote power control via the control panel, loading product configs, saving your current configs, renaming your previously saved configs, downloading your previously saved configs, and re-loading your previously saved configs onto a current session or session scheduled in the future.
If anyone runs into any problems with the scheduler or any of its features please submit feedback so we can get these issues addressed as soon as possible.
Thanks and good luck in your studies!
Tags: ios xr, rack-rentals, spv3
INE is proud to announce that our long awaited CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Rack Rentals are now available, which includes access to IOS XR routers! Furthermore during the initial beta testing of our new rack scheduling system, SPv3 rack rentals are FREE to book! Our new rack scheduler is easier to use than the previous version, and breaks rack sessions down into 3 hour blocks as opposed to the previous 6 hour blocks, which allows for more granularity and affordability in your study schedule. The new scheduler will remain in beta for the next week or so, during which sessions are free to book, but are limited to 1 concurrent session scheduled per customer. Below is a short HOWTO video that I created on using the new scheduling system:
For those of you on mobile platforms the direct link is http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzgoiS9tPI
Additionally a new update has been posted to the CCIE SPv3 Workbook, which now includes the first Full Scale Lab. These updates can be found in the Workbooks tab of the members site, as seen in the above video.
Tags: ios xr, rack rental, updates
INE is proud to announce that our long awaited CCIE Service Provider Lab Workbook Version 3.0 is now available! The initial pre-release of the workbook contains over 500 pages of technology focused labs to help you prepare for Cisco’s newest CCIE Service Provider Lab Exam. Similar to other “rough cut” books, the pre-release of the workbook is for students that want to begin work on their hands-on preparation for the lab exam without further delay. Over the next few weeks the workbook will be updated to include more technology labs, along with the full scale labs. The workbook includes a GNS3/Dynamips .net file that is compatible with the topology, and rack rentals that include IOS XR will be available soon. A sample of the workbook can be found here.
INE’s CCIE Service Provider Lab Workbook Version 3.0 is broken down into two main sections Continue Reading
Tags: dynamips workbook, gns3, ios xr, spv3
With the recent advent of the new 2.0 version CCNA, CCNP and CCIE Wireless certifications, as well as the (probably more notable) CCIE Data Center being announced this week (something that we reported to you first 8 months ago), INE is proud to announce that we are developing training for both of these prestigious Cisco certification tracks. We should have CCNA, CCNP and CCIE Wireless products all covering the new 2.0 version by this summer, and we will be purchasing at least one complete Data Center rack and develop courseware surrounding that new CCIE as well. We will evaluate the market, and our costs to asses if it is feasible to procure more CCIE Data Center racks for rental at that time.
Also we should note that we have just finished up 62 hours of a brand new CCNP Voice v8 bootcamp that will be available for stream or download next week, and that our new CCNP Security bootcamp is being filmed beginning on Monday, April 30, and should be available for stream or download the following week. Also that we will be adding 2 new CCIE Voice labs to our Volume II workbook here in the next month (one in about a week and one in about 3 weeks), and lastly (but by no means even close to least) that we are on track to release the new CCIE SPv3 workbook by the end of next week.
We look forward to working with all of you in your certification endeavors!
Continue Reading
Tags: ccie, CCIE Voice, CCNA, CCNP, data center, Security, service provider, sp, Wireless 2.0
I’ve been getting a lot of emails recently asking when our updated CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Workbooks and Rack Rentals are going to be released. And the answer is… soon In fact sooner than ever. We’re looking at somewhere around the end of March for the release of both the updated Workbook and Rack Rentals. The updated Workbook will be broken down into two sections, Technology Labs and Full Scale Labs. Essentially this will be the merging of the previous Volume 1 and Volume 2 workbooks into a single workbook that has two parts. A sample of the Technology Labs section of the CCIE SPv3 Workbook can be found here.
The technology labs closely follow the flow of our CCIE Service Provider Version 3.0 Advanced Technologies Class-on-Demand. The idea being that you will be able to watch the videos and then follow along with the hands-on portion of the technology based labs, or do the technology based labs and then fall back to the videos for sections that you don’t fully understand.
As for the hardware requirements of the Workbook everything that is regular IOS based will be able to be configured on Dynamips/GNS3, however as there is not yet a public virtualization solution for IOS XR this means that you’ll need hands-on experience with real IOS XR routers. You will be able to do this through our rack rentals, or the racks of several other vendors that will be compatible with our topology.
More information will be made available as the final release of the Workbooks and Rack Rentals approach.
Happy Labbing!
