IPexpert Volume 2 Section 9 Review

This was my second lab of the day and I stunk it up. I don't know what it was, but I just could not get off the ground on this thing. This is the type of stuff that worries me when the exam comes around. Not getting pass the L2 stuff can just kill you. Sometimes I read to much into crap.

I always think etherchannels have to be more than 1 port...they don't have to be. If the task says "show int trunk" can only show port-channels and you have a single link in there, make it a port-channel dammit!

Here are the screw-ups:

-4 task 1.1. A tricky question. There is an unused gig port that needed to be set up as a port-channel and trunk link. Without it you didn't have L2 connectivity between all the switches. I looked in the PG.

-3 task 1.2. I couldn't this task to work without messing up another. Turns out you had to use a voice vlan instead of a trunk port. I cheated so I could continue, it was affecting reachability. As you can see, I didn't get off to a great start on this one.

-4 task 3.3. Made an error on the ospf timers throttle command. I used msec values instead of sec. BONEHEAD!

-4 task 6.2. Didn't apply ACL to all required interfaces. The task was to allow only certain devices to sync via NTP. Access-group was not allowed so you needed to configure an extended ACL and apply it to the interfaces. I didn't put an ACL on one interface of R1 and R2 each.

-4 task 7.1. Couldn't get Hierarchical MQC to work. I really had this one, but the commands were giving me IOS errors about needing certain things. We needed to police http video to 200k while giving normal http 20% bandwidth. I think my problem was I had "bandwidth 200" configured under the video class which screwed things up later in the road. All I needed was "police 200000" under it.

-3 task 8.1. Didn't block ICMP from other hosts besides the loopbacks. I thought something was funny when I had a permit ip any any after another permit statement. For future reference, if you have a "permit ip any any" after another permit statement, you are probably forgetting to deny something!

-4 task 8.2. I had everything on this task but transport input none on vty 5 through 15. Stuff like this kills me.

-3 task 8.3. Didn't apply control policing on outbound direction. I only did it inbound. Why? I don't know.

This is probably the last time I do two full-scale practice labs in one day. It's doable I just feel like I let myself down and my brain is fried. There is at least 20 points up there that I should NOT have missed. No excuses whatsoever. I missed the first 2 tasks and the last 3 for 17 total points.

It all comes down to planning your attack at the beginning, following through with that plan and finishing strong. A clear mind and stamina are two things I did NOT have on this lab. If you have these issues, I suggest you address them. Fortunately, I believe practice labs are the way to do this :)

Now for the optimistic part of the post. To be honest the first 7 or 8 labs of volume 2 were kind of easy, very cut and dry. This one was a real test. I felt good reading the solution guide knowing that I fully understood where they were coming from. Even though I haven't taken the real thing yet, I expect this type of situation. You HAVE to think outside of the box. If the rest of Volume 2 is like this, I think I shall be well prepared.