From: Darby Weaver (darbyweaver@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Mar 26 2007 - 23:27:09 ART
All,
Allow me to divert your attention to a product I
recently reviewed from Narbik Kochans at NLI aka
CCBootcamp.
Basically it is a crisp and concise set of labs that
cover a few areas of BGP that many of us have had to
toil with for quite a while, read from many various
sources, and sometimes still seem to come up short
with a config when faced with a given scenario in the
lab.
The entire set of labs I reviewed consisted of 149
pages on the following topics:
Lab 1: Establishing Neighbor Adjacency
Lab 2: Route Reflectors
Lab 3: Conditional Advertisement & BGP Backdoor
Lab 4: Route Dampening
Lab 5: Route Aggregation
Lab 6: The Community Attribute
Lab 7: The AS-Path Attribute
Lab 8: The Local-Pref Attribute
Lab 9: The Weight Attribute
Lab 10: Multi Exit Disciminator Attribute
Lab 11: Filtering Routes Using Access-Lists and
Prefix-Lists
Lab 12: Regular Expressions
Lab 13: Advanced BGP Configurations
Lab 14: Administrative Distance
Lab 15: BGP Confederation
Now as you can plainly see and as it was told to me as
well, everything you need for the CCIE Lab is pretty
much in there. It is well written, it is a concise
guide and it is in its simplest format.
You can follow the labs without a router, but if you
have your pod handy you can easily follow along and
make good time. Never before was it so easy to
literally cover so many areas of BGP in only one
evening and sure enough, you can complete these labs
in just under 4 hours and that is even with a guy like
me who had to type them in by hand (I understand
pre-configs are available) and work them out one by
one. I type slow so your time may vary and you might
be able to bang them out even more quickly. Basically
each lab can be done in 10-20 minutes or so and be
repeated for complete and comprehensive understanding.
I think these labs will be an excellent introduction
into practical hands-on BGP Lab exercises as well as
the de-facto study guide used during the week leading
up to the lab or even the mnight before the lab if you
feel you still need a refresher on BGP.
I have read and done a lot of labs on BGP over the
last few years, but no one has as of yet broke BGP
down and made it so easy or so eloquent in my opinion
as Narbik has done with these labs.
I understand there are more labs like these coming out
soon to accompany this set for each section, I guess
you could make a COD or VOD for them too, but it would
probably only increase the expense, and I'm not saying
the guys from NLI will not do this (I'm not privy to
that information), but I will tell you these BGP Labs
and any other labs like them will hit the spot.
I do not know when these labs will be available for
public consumption or purchase, but you can contact
Narbik Kochans and Brad Ellis and I'm sure they can
fill in the blanks.
Summry: Clear and concise coverage of BGP Major
topics that are easy to read, easy to follow, easy to
do, and easy to verify with just enough commentary to
make the critical points stick. Very good stuff.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sun Apr 01 2007 - 06:35:53 ART