Woohoo!  I passed the ROUTE test this morning.  That means I’m done with the CCNP track!  :)

If you remember, I took it over a week ago and had some bad luck on it.  Alright, bad luck is the wrong phrase.  I didn’t study enough and failed it.  This time, though, I had a special weapon on my side - the ROUTE Foundations book.  I haven’t used the Foundations books before, but, I saw some tweets about this one, so I picked it up off of Safari.  In just a couple pages, I realized that I was reading the answers to several questions directly out of the book.  It was amazing.  I only studied my weak points and wound up with 144 more points than I did last time.  I can’t say that was entirely because of the book, but I must say it was a big reason.

As always, corrections are requested.

Study Questions

• I’ve got IGRP and EIGRP both configured with the same AS number.  What’s special about this configuration?

If both use the same AS number, then they automatically redistribute their routes into each other without using the redistribute command.

• When redistributing one IGP into another, where’s a good place to filter routes?

There’s no one good place, but at the router(s) that’s doing the redistribution is a good start.  There’s no need to send an IGP a bunch of routes it doesn’t need.

I didn’t do so well on IGP redistribution the last time out, so here’s some more stuff to study.  As always, feel free to correct.

Study Questions

• What three things are needed to be able to redistribute one routing protocol into another?

1. One or more links into each routing protocol 2. A proper, working config for each protocol 3. The addition of the redistribute command to one or more of the protocols

I took the ROUTE test today and failed like I usually do.  That makes me 3-4 on these P-level tests if you’re scoring at home.  Don’t worry, though.  I’m not giving up.  :)

In atypical fashion, I must say that the ROUTE test was a good test.  Let me say that again.  The ROUTE test was a good test.  I said good, though…not great.  There were a few problems with it that I’ll get to, but, overall, this is the best test I’ve ever taken for a Cisco cert.  The questions were very well-written and there were no obvious omissions or wrong details.  I failed this test because I simply didn’t put in enough work.

Corrections, please.  I skipped a bunch of BGP intro stuff to get to the juicy center.  I’ll see if I can come back later and finish the other parts for posterity.

Study Notes

• Is BGP route selection a controversial subject?

Yes.  If you ask 1000 network guys the best way to influence BGP, you’ll probably get 1000 different answers.

• At what position in the PA list of a BGP update do you find the weight attribute?

You don’t.  Weight is a Cisco-proprietary thing.

Corrigeme, por favor.

Study Notes

• What do IPSec tunnels give you when a branch office is on a broadband connection?

Privacy through encryption Authentication of the remote peer through ISAKMP Delivery of private data over the public Internet

• What do you need to configure to get your branch router talking to the Internet?

ISP connection configuration such as PPPoE or PPPoA DHCP server configuration for internal users NAT Firewall services like inspection and filtering

Study Questions

• Your boss says that ever host in the network needs to be converted over to IPv6 by the end of the day.  Which of multipoint tunnels, point-to-point tunnels, or native IPv6 would be the most appropriate to use to help with that conversion?

Native IPv6

• The engineering department wants to permanently use IPv6 on their test boxes in two offices.  Which of multipoint tunnels, point-to-point tunnels, or native IPv6 would be the most appropriate to use?

Point-to-point tunnels

Study Questions

• Why would anyone develop a version of RIP that supports IPv6?

I have no idea.  Boredom, maybe.  Whatever the case, it works just like RIPv2, which is pretty scary.

• In EIGRP for IPv4, there are several requirements for two routers to neighbor up.  Which of those is not true for EIGRP for IPv6?

The two routers don’t need to be in the same subnet.  The concept of the link local address takes care of that need since neighbors always share a common medium like an Ethernet segment or a serial link.

Study Notes

• Exactly how big is an IPv6 address?

It’s 128 bits long.

• This shouldn’t be on the test, but how many unique addresses is that?

That’s 2^128 or a “3” with 38 zeros after it.  That’s also 2^95 addresses for each person on earth.

• Surely we’re not writing in binary, are we?

No way.  IPv6 uses 32 hex characters.  Each character is 4 bits, so we wind up with 128 bits of data.

Feel free to correct.

Study Questions

• What’s the most primitive way to get traffic destined to a single host to use a different path than your dynamic IGP dictates?

Use a static route.

• What’s the most primitive way to get traffic sourced from a single host to use a different path than your dynamic IGP dictates?

Use policy-based routing (PBR).

• What’s the most primitive way to get traffic sourced from a single host and destined for another host to use a different path than your dynamic IGP dictates?

Use PBR.

As always, feel free to correct.

Study Notes

• When a router redistributes from one routing protocol to another, where does the router get the list of routes to redistribute?

From the routing table.  Only IGP A’s routes (not topology or successors) are redistributed into IGP B’s domain.

• What are two methods of filtering redistributed routes?

Use a route-map in the redistribute line or a distribute-list.

• Of the two methods for filtering, which one has more options?

The route-map method has more options.  You can match on all sorts of stuff, including an ACL or interface, and filter based on that.

As always, feel free to correct.

Study Questions

• When you redistribute OSPF into EIGRP, what are you really redistributing?

Routes knows via OSPF Networks of OSPF-enabled interfaces

• What’s the default cost of an EIGRP route redistributed into OSPF?

20

• What’s the default metric of an OSPF route redistributed into EIGRP?

There is none since EIGRP has all those nifty k-values that have to be processed.  Routes actually won’t redistribute without them.

Feel free to correct.  I feel like I’m missing a big piece here, so please fill in a gap if you see one.  Thanks.  :)

Study Questions

• How many area 0s (zero) can you have in an OSPF implementation

Just one.

• If my company merges with another company, and we’re both running OSPF, how can we get our networks routing together properly?

The easiest thing to do is to connect your two area 0s together through some physical link.  If you can, you can use virtual links to connect an ABR to another ABR to extend the zones together.

Feel free to correct all this stuff.  Additions are also welcome.

Study Questions

• How do I keep an area route from reaching a router in that area?

You don’t.  That defeats the whole purpose of having the topology database on every router.  If you filtered one route from a router, there’s no way that SPF could calculate routes correctly.

• Fine, then.  Where do I filter routes?

You filter routes on an ABR or ASBR.  Since routers only have the whole topology for their area, it’s safe to filter routes from another area or from a redistributed routing protocol.  On a more technical note, you’re filtering type-3 LSAs on an ABR and type-5 LSAs on an ASBR.

Corrections welcome.

Study Questions

• Why would you ever want to summarize routes?

Summarizing routes minimizes the routes advertised to the network.  For example, instead of advertising 192.168.0.0/24, 192.168.1.0/24…192.168.n.0/24, a router can advertise a single route to 192.168.0.0/16.  Keeping routing tables small saves hardware resources, minimizes convergence times, helps avoid route flapping, and makes the routing table easier to read for humans.

• When will an EIGRP router auto-summarize a route?

If a router has interfaces that that are in different classes of network (Class A, B, C), then that router will auto-summarize those routes up to the classful boundary.  For example, if you have a 10.0.0.1/24 and a 192.168.100.1/30, the router will advertise 10.0.0.0/8 and 192.168.100.0/24.

Or neighborships, as they call it in the book.  What a terrible word.

Study Questions

• What settings must match between two routers in order to become EIGRP neighbors?

Both routers must be in the same primary subnet Both routers must be configured to use the same k-values Both routers must in the same AS Both routers must have the same authentication configuration (within reason) The interfaces facing each other must not be passive

I’ve seen and used the command before, but I’ve never really seen any use of the show ip protocols command until tonight while reading up for my ROUTE test.  There’s a lot of good information in the output, and, from the way the book is reading, this is a great candidate for use in a lab question.

To check it out a bit, I set up a small network with four routers connected only to a single Ethernet segment.  I set up one router to run EIGRP, OSPF, and BGP to each one of the other routers just so I could see the output for the different routing protocols.  Here’s what puked out after struggling with GNS for a few minutes.