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Posts Tagged ‘advantage’

When you’re studying for the CCNA and CCNP exams, you’ve got a lot of different choices when it comes to training. One popular choice is choosing one of the many “boot camps” and five-day in-person courses that are out there. I’ve taught quite a few of these, and while many of them are good, they do have drawbacks.

Of course, one is cost. Many employers are putting the brakes on paying for CCNA and CCNP boot camps, and most candidates can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars for such a class. Then you’ve got travel costs, meals, and having to possibly burn your own vacation time to take the class. Add in time away from your family and boot camps become impractical for many CCNA / CCNP candidates.

Another issue is fatigue. I enjoy teaching week-long classes, but let’s face facts – whether you’re training for the CCNA or CCNP exams, you’re going to get a lot of information thrown at you in just a few days. You’re going to be mentally and physically exhausted at the end of the week, and that’s when some boot camps actually have you take the exam! You’ve got to be refreshed and rested when you take the exam to have your best chance of success.
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BGP is one of the most complex topics you’ll study when pursuing your CCNP, if not the most complex. I know from personal experience that when I was earning my CCNP, BGP is the topic that gave me the most trouble at first. One thing I keep reminding today’s CCNP candidates about, though, is that no Cisco technology is impossible to understand if you just break it down and understand the basics before you start trying to understand the more complex configurations.

BGP attributes are one such topic. You’ve got well-known mandatory, well-known discretionary, transitive, and non-transitive. Then you’ve got each individual BGP attribute to remember, and the order in which BGP considers attributes, and what attributes even are… and a lot more! As with any other Cisco topic, we have to walk before we can run. Let’s take a look at what attributes are and what they do in BGP.

BGP attributes are much like what metrics are to OSPF, RIP, IGRP, and EIGRP. You won’t see them listed in a routing table, but attributes are what BGP considers when choosing the best path to a destination when multiple valid (loop-free) paths exist.

When BGP has to decide between such paths, there is an order in which BGP considers the path attributes. For success on the CCNP exams, you need to know this order. BGP looks at path attributes in this order:
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CCNP exam success, particularly on the BSCI exam, demands you understand the details of route summarization. This skill not only requires that you have a comfort level with binary conversions, but you have to know how and where to apply route summarization with each individual protocol.

You also have to know the “side effects” of route summarization. With OSPF, there will actually be an extra interface created at the point of summarization, and this catches a lot of CCNP candidates by surprise. Let’s take a look at the null0 interface and how it relates to OSPF summarization.

On R1, the following networks are redistributed into OSPF, and then summarized.

interface Loopback16

ip address 16.16.16.16 255.0.0.0

interface Loopback17

ip address 17.17.17.17 255.0.0.0

interface Loopback18

ip address 18.18.18.18 255.0.0.0

interface Loopback19
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