TSHOOT Passed

Well the Journey is over. I'm finally a CCNP. When this exam was 1st announced a lot of people cringed about what they would or could ask you. I can say that they can't ask you much since they are running with a limited sim. The best advice I can give you is come up with a lab and get down a structured troubleshooting approach. We have 3 main ones that are discusssed in the exam. TOP DOWN, BOTTOM UP, and DIVIDE and CONQUER. Well TOP down kinda doesn't work here since we are only dealing with Layers 1-3. Divide and conquer and bottom up work great for the exam. If you haven't already you can get the exam topology.



So you already know what to build and what to look at. Next is how we approach it. I'm sure there are several methods and I will share mine. 1st thing I do is go to the Client PC and run a IPCONFIG. I see if there is a IP address and there is a default gateway. If there is one I ping it. If I don't get a reply then I know its a problem between the PC and the Distro Switch. If I do get a reply I know the problem is further up the topology. So lets say I got a reply I go the default gateway and I ping the Sever on the other side of the topology. Then if no reply I run a traceroute. That can usually get me to where the device is having issues. Once I'm at the device in Question I start the process over again with layer 1. Do a sh ip int br check to see if the interfaces are up. if they are move on to layer 3. Check to see if the neighbor relations have formed. If not find out why. If they have why aren't we passing routes. This is just a quick Idea into how I navigated the exam. I did pretty much the same 3-4 commands for every ticket which lead me to solving the majority of the problems. Happy Networking!!!!

World of Telco Part 2

So did we get a happy ending? Check the break down

Day 2. I got one the national providers to get a local provider on the phone. They actually came out to site and check the smart jack. No problems found. They then did some smoke and mirrors in telco world and cleared the loop. So now we don't see a loop but no circuit. We then looped from the smart jack back to the other site I knew was good before I came out here. UP/UP. Ran a loop from the the providers near me to my equipment across campus. Down/Down, but this time we we are getting AIS errors. More than likely the circuit has not been crosed, or it has been crossed 2 times and canceled out. No time to try to figure out who had a cross and who didn't. The guys in the demark room crossed it from the smart jack to the repeater. UP/UP. Removed the loop from the cloud back to the router UP/UP. OH YEAH!!!! Direct connection. After that turned on Crypto Maps, Up/DOWN to UP/UP. Setup OSPF UP/UP/FULL Came back to my hotel room.

I get to do this in another city after the holiday. FUN FUN FUN.

The world of Telco

The world of telco. It seems so simple to us, but at times it can be hair pulling and mind numbing. To most people it just seems like smoke and mirrors on how they get their connections, to us who provide network services it’s a never ending battle of proving who’s right and who’s gear it is. Lets start with todays example. I have been hooking up a series of sites for a client. They are on a quest to get all of there sites off random cable/sat modems to 1 unifed network. By the way hats off to the guy who got the initial setup done, some fancy tricks done with IOS firewall that I will be borrowing from you ☺. The site in particular I had the circuit delivered to one site much earlier so I took advantage and got loops up from the telco’s gear on the other site. UP/UP. I’m thinking this is going to be easy turn up. WRONG. 1st problem. On the other side the circuit was finally delivered, the problem was that the circuit delivery point and my facility had some distance between them. Those guys just extended the circuit not even thinking about that a T1 signal can’t go that far. To be fair this was a free service. I guess paid service they would have thought about that. So I had to rush out and get repeaters(not really rush I just grabbed them off the shelf and get them shipped). Ok done that simple. Site turn up day. The guys had the circuit patched wrong. That took a few min to fix. Then I stripped down a pair got them to the 66 block and Repeater. Got the repeater to the other side and do the same process. Repeaters sink up. Easy day. Nope. After on the phone with the Telco they are telling me we have a pair flipped wrong. Now the guys I were working with where some country bumpkins, but I had a strong feeling they knew what they were doing and the telco’s history has been shaky. So what I do is run back to my equipment use a female loopback and look the circuit back to the telco. They see it up., I unplug it and they see it UP!!!! Power down the Repeater they see it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Pull the cable from the smart jack and guess what it was UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Those bastards have a loop in the circuit after insisting is was our end. I don’t have a happy ending to this story just more of a rant of my world of telco’s. Happy Networking!!!!!!!!