Last week I passed the F5 BIG-IP LTM v9.0 essentials exam. Was easier than I thought, however tomorrow I may be humbled further as I go for the advanced version of the F5 BIG-IP LTM v9.0 test. Studying with the training books from 4 days worth of training but without further hands on is not what I call fun. Admittedly it’s a lot easier than CCIE so what really am I moaning about. I suppose it the fact that I’m not studying for my next lab…

I’ve just been taught a lesson in humility and authorship. My post about Cisco’s NTP authentication implementation received a comment from a certain Frank. I’ve added my comment and need to verify my statment as soon as I can manage to get some hands-on in a lab again (not got Dynamips set-up yet)…

Today I’ve resigned from my position at Easynet and signed with nscglobal as a Consultant. First thing while writing here is to thank Easynet for the time there, the opportunities and trust given to me. Despite moving my desk from Rotterdam to Amsterdam within six months of employment, I have thoroughly enjoyed working for Easynet. Seeing it mature from a internationally fragmented company into an upcoming global enterprise player has been both challenging and inspiring.

For those who don’t know nscglobal, they’re a UK integrator and I’ll be working in one of their London offices. This means moving from The Netherlands to the United Kingdom and we’ll be doing so physically in January. We’re looking for a rental house for multiple reasons but for this site the relevant one is my CCIE. Once in the UK I need to start focussing on my CCIE again and I hope to be able to do so with the support of some of the CCIE’s nscglobal has. So be ready for some new CCIE updates starting January.

Till then I’ll probably blog about whatever technology comes my way during the move. For example the UK mobile operator 3 has an offer with free Skype calls so I might be looking into UMTS coverage in London, Hitchin and the rest of the extended North of London. Plus I’ll be looking for a hosting location for my two servers, offers are welcome. Offers for dedicated hosting too, might help the uptime of things… My VoIP setup will have to change as well, only slightly as I’ll only be adding an FXO port at home.

Anyway just keep reading and you’ll find out, the great thing is that I don’t have to keep silent any more about what is going on and that we’re looking forward to new things.

I debugged and pinged, even installed hping3 to do UDP pings. I don’t want to run cacti as root, especially not on a vhost. So the UDP ping had to work. The pings arrived but still no replies.

Getting sidetracked I noticed that the one router that did work was being hit by SSH login attempts and it’s cpu was spiking. An ACL took care of the break-in attempts but then I noticed that directed broadcasts were made to my server’s segment. So I nailed that down plus proxy-arps when I noticed that the router which had worked before now was causing errors in Cacti as well.

Tracking back I noticed that the UDP ping ‘replies’ were unreachables rather than ICMP replies (doh, how obvious!) . I enabled IP unreachables on both routers again and I was done. It’s amazing how blind one can be at times to the blatantly obvious…

Even though it’s a 12% price increase it’s been 8 years since the previous increase. It’s been argued on Groupstudy that a 2% annual increase is not bad as it’s relatively on par with the inflation we’ve seen over the last 8 years. Never the less for those of us forced to pay for our own labs it’s a bitter pill to take.

Also note that all exams from CCNA to the CCIE written and lab have increased in price.

Since my last post I’ve been very busy with work related issues and as such have not had the time or the right frame of mind to study. Please bear with me as I work to get back into the game. Feel free to comment on my previous posts, or this one if you like. It really helps me to know that other find this stuff useful.

ip route prefix mask {ip-address | interface-type interface-number [ip-address]} [dhcp] [distance] [name next-hop-name] [permanent | track number] [tag tag]

Static routes that point to an interface on a connected router will be advertised by way of Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and EIGRP regardless of whether redistribute static commands are specified for those routing protocols.

This situation occurs because static routes that point to an interface are considered in the routing table to be connected and hence lose their static nature. Also, the target of the static route should be included in the network (DHCP) command. If this condition is not met, no dynamic routing protocol will advertise the route unless a redistribute static command is specified for these protocols

The following is also good to know, I’ve noticed it’s source of common misunderstanding:

Specifying a numerical next hop that is on a directly connected interface will prevent the router from using proxy ARP. However, if the interface with the next hop goes down and the numerical next hop can be reached through a recursive route, you may specify both the next hop and interface (for example, ip route0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 ethernet 1/2 10.1.2.3) with a static route to prevent routes from passing through an unintended interface.

Source  (UniverCD)

Eek, Cisco keeps tabs on page hits when checking available lab seats. I set up firefox to automatically reload the page which works fine but resulted in me being locked out. Luckily only for a day but at 28 days before my ideal lab date this is not funny.

The following advice to all who’re desperate for a lab date: Be persistent but do not over do it.

ERROR: The ‘Available Lab Seats’ activity limit for the candidate has been exceeded for today. Please try again tomorrow.

[edit, 17 Aug 2007] I’ve managed to move to September 28th and I’ll stick with it for now. There’s enough to keep me busy till then, may circumstantially even have to move my date back. I’ll be diving back into the books/lab next week, too much social stuff going on this week.

[edit, 10 Sep 2007] Sadly I have cancelled my September 28th seat. There’s just too much going on right now to be able to concentrate, let alone to have enough time to commit to studying. I’m hoping I’ll ba able to move my Feb 19th date forward but for now it would be wise to keep the February date, at least until some things settle down.