Keeping track & typo’s – 31 days to go.

What is it with typo’s – is it that we get used to using F7 with Microsoft Word\Outlook to auto-correct our natural spelling mistakes? There is of course no such luxury in IOS and I am constantly having to backtrack on small errors not just typos that have huge implications.

Examples include …..

• NET addressing with ISIS
• Advertising networks into BGP
• Enabling mpls traffic-eng tunnels on the wrong physical interfaces
• Specifying the wrong ip addresses for various interfaces
• Adding neighbors into the wrong address-families
• Wrong mask details for OSPF networks or when filtering through access-lists\prefix-lists, etc
• Missing configurations – e.g. not placing all route-target import\export entries across all transit routers in the inter-network
• Redstribution Filtering – trying to trap all posssibilities – I favour the tagging method.

You’ll have noticed that my blogging has been less technical and more observational – this is of course deliberate – more hours labbing! I have some rack rental time over the coming weekends with both INE & IPExpert – I have put together 4 “Master Labs” basically a culmination of both the aforementioned workbooks plus my recalled tasks I received in my 1st lab attempt [No, not available] – broken these into the 9 sections – put a big chart on my whiteboard and ticking the boxes off as I go. I am fairly confident I can sort out the foundations of the lab reasonably quickly i.e. L2\IGP\EGP & MPLS. The key for me will be obtaining as many of the MPLS VPN’s 27 points available. I am confident with Basic\Multi-VRF, MP-iBGP, MP-eBGP but advanced configurations are killing me time wise and even though I can configure up L2VPN it just seems so strange to type in ‘interworking ip’ commands on one end of the network and the neighbors appear by magic on the other – Good Stuff!