I completed NetMasterClass.com DOiT scenario 22 today. This was an awesome lab. I don’t know exactly why, but I got a lot out of this. I felt “in the zone” all day. The stuff I knew, I did well with. I found some ways to save time by combining steps. I piddled away some time with BGP and redistribution. I got slowed down by BGP because I choose the neighbor addresses for a non-adjacent peer poorly, causing a few routing loops. Redistribution was slow only because there were 22 (!) required redistributions, not including any “redistribute connected” that needed to be added. I committed to a scheme early on, and only had issues with one little subnet that messed me up after I got everything going.
I’ll blog tech details tomorrow. There were a number of interesting tasks and solutions. I don’t think anyone could complete this lab in 8 hours, not unless you knew every single task off the top of your head and could implement the IOS code without errors. Many of the tasks were tedious, like the redistribution I mentioned before. The IPv6 was a little overbearing, I felt. The multicast was almost comical – Anycast-RP with MSDP, plus literally every interface on every router included in PIM, and every multicast router supposed to be able ping and get a response back from every other router. There was a traffic engineering task that required you to put in lots of little policy routes all over 4 different routers to man-handle a certain conversation.
It was all just a bit much, but still an awesome lab. In all fairness to the creator of this monster, the RIP and EIGRP sections were super-simple, presumably to give you time to work on the other stuff. But it was still insane. Ah, well. More on this scenario tomorrow.