training

Arista ACE Training

Brent training

Last week I had the opportunity to attend Arista ACE 2.1 training down at the HQ offices in Santa Clara. I was very fortunate to be in a class that was lead by Gary Donahue, the author of Arista Warrior. He is an excellent presenter and a extremely personable individual. If you ever have a chance to be in a class of his, sign up for it.

Photo Apr 18, 12 00 12 PM

The training was very hands on, with labs that covered Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP), Multi-Chassis LAG (MLAG), Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), and my favorite topic, the wonderful EAPI. Coming from a Cisco CCNA/CCNP background, these topics helped fill knowledge gaps on the Arista family of hardware.

At the end of the class, Gary was signing copies of his book so I left with a author signed copy of Arista Warrior. Not a bad addition to the growing collection of O’Reilly books around the house.

Photo Apr 25, 8 14 33 PM

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GNS3 and VRRP Timers

Brent routing, switching, training ,

While testing out a VRRP solution, I noticed that it was not performing as expected. The VRRP address was unresponsive so I started to investigate. Turning on console logging, I saw a large amount of flapping between Backup and Master states.

...
*Mar  1 02:37:23.739: VRRP: Grp 1 Event - Master down timer expired
*Mar  1 02:37:23.739: %VRRP-6-STATECHANGE: Vl20 Grp 1 state Backup -> Master
*Mar  1 02:37:25.095: %VRRP-6-STATECHANGE: Vl20 Grp 1 state Master -> Backup
...

It turns out that running 8 routers in GNS3 on my laptop was slightly under-powered platform and resulting in over a 2 second maximum response time from a VRRP peer.

Sending 8000, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 10.10.20.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!..!!!..........................
......................................................!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!....................................................................
.....................!!!......................!!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!!!
..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
Success rate is 74 percent (611/818), round-trip min/avg/max = 4/705/1996 ms
Server-A#

After adjusting the advertise timers, everything started to perform as expected.

R1#
interface Vlan20
 ip address 10.10.20.2 255.255.255.0
 vrrp 1 ip 10.10.20.1
 vrrp 1 timers advertise 10
 vrrp 1 priority 110
 
R2#
interface Vlan20
 ip address 10.10.20.3 255.255.255.0
 vrrp 1 ip 10.10.20.1
 vrrp 1 timers advertise 10

 

Cisco Live 2014

Brent cisco, training

This was my first year at a Cisco Live and I was truly amazed. The caliber of the speakers, the venue, and atmosphere makes the event well worth attending.

Schedule

TECCRS-2932 — Campus LAN Switching Architecture
BRKSPG-2206 — Towards Massively Scalable Ethernet: Technologies and Standards
BRKRST-2044 — Enterprise Multi-Homed Internet Edge Architectures
PSODCT-1407 — Building Highly scalable 40/100G Fabrics with Nexus 7700
BRKARC-2350 — IOS Routing Internals
BRKRST-3321 — Advanced – Scaling BGP
BRKOPT-2116 — High Speed Optics 40G, 100G & Beyond – Data Center Fabrics & Optical Transport
BRKSEC-2003 — IPv6 Security Threats and Mitigations

Exams

CCNP Switch (642-813) *passed*

Pictures

IMG_20140519_124557IMG_20140519_123527IMG_20140522_084855IMG_20140522_084813

IMG_20140523_090902

20140522_140817

Introduction to DNS and BIND

Brent training , ,

This week I attended a two day long session on DNS and BIND hosted by Internet Systems Consortium with Alan Clegg as the instructor. Coming from a background of Active Directory-Integrated DNS, this was a wonderful opportunity to have hands on exposure to BIND.

The class started with topics that covered RFC 799 (1981) and RFC 822/833 (1983), DNS namespace, name resolution, caching, recursion, iteration, and stub resolvers. A major focus of the class was on BIND, which included history, configuration, and hands-on lab time to setup and troubleshoot common BIND issues.

A major benefit of being in the ISC office was the ability to talk to people that operate the F-Root servers. We have the opportunity to engineers about their software life-cycle, patching procedures, common support issues, and thread mitigation techniques.