IPexpert Volume 2 Section 10 Review

I just completed this lab, took about 5 hours and scored pretty well. As far as I can tell I only missed 3 tasks for a total of 9 points. And the ones I missed were not that tough...

-2 Task 2.1 Switching
Didn't know the command to prevent channel misconfiguration from disabling the ports. The command is "no spanning-tree etherchannel guard-misconfig". I was looking under the errdisable commands.

-2 Task 2.2 Switching
Ports should wait 44 seconds before they forward. I set forward timer to 22, the PG said it was 12, because ports also wait max-age timer.

-5 Task 11.1 Security
Task said to allow "mail' so I allowed SMTP. The PG had POP3 as well.

The major difference between this lab and other labs were the number of sections. There was a total of 38 tasks across 13 sections. Each task had a 1 or two bullets and was usually 2 or 3 points. This is opposed to some labs where the tasks are 4 or 5 points but have several bullets of things to accomplish.

After my first read-through, I thought this would be a difficult lab but once I got started it was relatively easy. There was no multicast or IPv6 and the QoS section was really easy. The only security task was the long ACL which I missed because I only specified SMTP as "mail" instead of including POP3...oh well.

The only real challenging task was some conditional advertisement in BGP which I got real quick after browsing the DocCD. R6 was only supposed to advertise loopback 201, if 200 was shutdown. So I created an advertise-map that matched loopback 201 (via ACL), and a non-exist map that matched loopback 200 (also via ACL). This worked perfectly and I was kind of surprised I got it to work so fast, since I have had trouble in the past with bgp conditional advertisements.

Wish I had more to say at this point but it was pretty much smooth sailing. All while watching the Raiders destroy the Broncos :)