I spent my lunch hour and about a half-hour past when I was supposed to leave re-cabling my rack for the InternetworkExpert.com 4.1 Volume 3 workbook. This is the third re-cable I’ve done since starting prep. Compared to the other 2 (NetMasterClass.com DOiT Volume 2 and Narbik Kocharians’ Advanced Lab Workbooks), IE uses more interconnections. I am OUT of DCE/DTE cables and V.35 serial interfaces. OUT. I had 6 (SIX!) spare DCE/DTE pairs before cabling today. Maybe for my next CCIE I’ll get a hold of some RJ-45 terminated T1 WICs instead of the V.35 interfaces. Hey – I went with what I could scrounge. ;) IE is also a little nuts with the switch interlinks – there are 18 of them.
I didn’t get in actual rack time to do a lab, but at least I proved out my cabling. I turned up HDLC links for all the router-to-router serial stuff. I verified that all the serials attached to my frame-relay switch were seeing DLCI’s. I verified with CDP all of the ethernet uplinks between the routers and switches. So I’m happy with that. I should be able to get some rack time in tomorrow, now that I’m all cabled up. Worst case, I have to tweak the FRS config some more, but I think it should be correct unless I botched the interface numbering.
I did get a teeny bit of IOS time in tonight. I tweaked the QoS on my personal router that I uses as a firewall. Tonight, I was playing with DSCP values and WRED, tagging different classes of traffic as it leaves my network, then watching what DSCP-based WRED does as the tagged conversations go by. I also set up SNMP so that I could do some historical graphing of bandwidth utilization and CPU. I am working the router a little hard with all the stuff I’ve turned on, so I thought I should keep a closer eye on it.