First graded lab 360 completed & Passed

Today I took my first graded lab in the Cisco 360. This was good, because now I was up against the clock as I would be in the real lab. I was able to pass with a 83/100, and still, redistribution is tripping me up. For some reason I can't get my mind wrapped around it.

Most of the items in the lab I was able to complete without issue. There were a few times when I messed myself up. For example, one section in for RIP, it asked to make sure that there were only unicast updates being sent between the neighbors. I did everything right: 1. I made sure that the interfaces were passived in RIP process . 2. Configured the neighbor statement on each side. I messed up on # 2 because I configured the wrong IP address on one of the neighbor statements. Thank God I actually ran the debug ip rip events to see one side was still sending multicast updates to 224.0.0.9, or else I would have lost points.

There was one BGP task that messed me up for a minute as well. It asked me to configure a summary address for 4 prefixes learned via my iBGP neighbor, which came from an external AS. The catch is, they wanted me to advertise this to a neighboring BGP AS, but it said to make it appear as if the routes came from the Originating AS, and to do this with only a summary route, no specific subnets. At first I was getting crazy thinking ok, how Can I send an eBGP update, and make that AS thing that the orignating AS sent it. As you can imagine, that wasn't going to well. I took a quick glance at the Doc CD config guide, and command reference and quickly saw the BGP AS-SET option. This is what I needed. The as-set command when used with an aggregate address will list the path in the eBGP update, showing the AS's that the update came through, and of course starting with the AS that sent it. So in the end aggreate-address x.x.x.x mask y.y.y.y as-set summary-only, did the trick.

I new this was the last task and according to my calculations of other tasks, I needed to get these 4 points to pass the lab. Sure enough, when I get the lab results , I got 83/1000. Without these 4 points I would not have passed.

I am happy to have passed, but not satisified. I need to be better, quicker, and not make some of the silly mistakes I am making.

Until next time :)