Back on track.... sort of.

I'm back to studying Service Provider material... but instead of continuing where I left off, INE Vol 1 Multicast Labs, I'm reading/re-reading 'MPLS Fundamentals'.

A lab I set up for AToM comes from chapter 10 of the book.

I tried to recreate the configuration from memory and being that it's only a few lines, I thought it would be easy.

I missed the configuration "mpls ldp router-id loopback 0 force" and until I put that command in, the VC never came up. This lab was for a simple HDLC connection.

What's the significance of this command? Why does the MPLS router-id have to be set?

Hmm...

*** Edit

I'm assuming the LDP router-id has to be the same has the xconnect peer. I'm guessing if I didn't for the router-id to be the loopback but specified the outgoing interfaces as the xconnect peers, it would have worked. Time to lab it up.

*** Edit 2

Odd, I tested it out, removed the mpls ldp router-id force command, clear mpls ldp nei *, xconnect to the serial interface of the remote end, the L2 VC circuit showed up, but the CE router interfaces never came up.

Side Tracked - Passed CCNA Voice.

With 2010 comes new goals, both personal and professional. I decided to take some time to study, lab up, and take the CCNA Voice 640-460 exam. Overall it was pretty straightforward, I studied using a single router with an AIM-CUE for CME and CUE, CBT-Nuggets and the OECG. No access to an UC-500 but that's ok. Was this a personal goal? No, it was work related.

Now I'm debating on CCVP... what to do... what to do...

INE Vol 1 - Multicast Lab 1 - ip pim dense mode.

I still have to revisit the last lab and review the comments in the last post but I went ahead and did the first lab of the IP Multicast section in Vol 1 INE.

Relatively easy as it's basic PIM Dense mode multicast and was covered under R&S.

There's 13 labs in this section and that will complete Vol 1. I'm also going over the CoD for SP from INE too and I'm finding them very helpful

I'm thinking of going on to IEMENTOR's lab book... but after that, what should I tackle next? IPX vol 2 or INE vol 2 (both have 10 labs)...

INE Vol 1 - Lab 26 - finished - Mulicast over MPLS VPNs

I completed this lab, albeit, I had to cheat and look at the solutions for some parts since I wasn't sure what to do.

Question:

1. What is the purpose of MDT under the VRF?

I suppose, I'll Cisco Univercd or google it.

Also my verifications didn't come up. When I do a "show ip pim vrf SW1-SW2 neighbor" I don't actually see the tunnel0 interface of R3 or R6. The tunnel interface is up/up though.

Think I have to read about Multicast over MPLS A LOT more.

INE Vol 1 - Lab 25 - finished - MPLS QOS

QoS is pretty straight forward for SP as it is for R&S. Just have to read carefully what's being classified, what's being marked, and where and what direction to apply the service policy. Then you have to make sure it's consistent throughout the SP network.

It's more of exercise in being careful and thorough then anything else.

On to the Last lab in the MPLS section...

INE Vol 1 - Lab 24 - finished - TE Unequal Cost Load Balancing

Completed this lab pretty easily since it was combination of the 2 before it, one dynamic tunnel and one explicit tunnel, manipulating the tunnel bandwidth for unequal cost load balancing via OSPF.

Something I don't understand is why INE didn't have TE labs based on ISIS, the 3 TE labs were using OSPF. I understand they are pretty similar to each other with an addition of using Wide Metric (metric style wide) under the physical interfaces. But still, it would have been nice to through 1 lab in there with IS-IS.

On to the next lab.

INE Vol 1 - Lab 23 - finished - TE Explicit PE to PE tunnel.

Very similar with the last lab with exception of creating an
'ip explicit-path name ABC enable' and then on the tunnel interface
'tunnel mpls traffic-eng path-option 1 explicit name ABC'

One gotcha is to make sure that the HOPs in the list are correct... I had a 10.x.x.x network but I put it in as 150.x.x.x because the rest of the network was like that.

Another good one to review and dissect.