The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Juniper Networks.
I finished up a little studying for the JNCIS-SEC and finally took the test. Normally I can walk in and feel pretty sure about myself with the material but the first few questions really through me off my game. To combat this, I marked them for review and came back at the end to finish out the test. While I like the review function of tests I know better to go back and change answers – it usually kicks me in the but.
In the end, I am now JNCIS-SEC certified! Not a great score – a 75, but a pass is a pass. A lot of cool concepts learned, reinforced some others, and I am ready to plug away at my next test. I did take 2 weeks to study for a Brocade BCNE (Brocade Certified Network Engineer) test since it is something the company I work for resells. I don’t know if it is because I’ve advanced myself concept wise to the point that most questions are really easy with these entry tests or if the test itself is just that easy. One thing is for sure, the test requires a 58% or better to become certified. You could probably walk in with a little network knowledge and guess you way through most of it or get extremely lucky with the multiple choice – the passing score should really be raised. My two weeks a prior knowledge of most of the material let me walk out with a 93%.
So what’s next? Back to the original plan – pursuing my JNCIE-Enterprise certification. To get to the final test, I have to take one more – the JNCIP-ENT which brings in the concepts of Multicast, CoS, and Telephony – the rest of the concepts are just repeats for the JNCIS but I will need to review those.
I will be utilizing the O’Reilly Juniper Enterprise Routing and the Enterprise Switching books mostly. I also have copies of the old Juniper student guides for routing and switching that I will use when the material overlaps.
So – I am going to start with Multicast. I’ve done quite a bit of Multicast troubleshooting in the past and have a good idea of traffic flow, but I know I have been missing the small pieces to complete the picture. I am staring off by doing a quick read of the Multicast section of the O’Reilly Routing book. Here are my notes from the first read through of what I found important.
Now that the boring part is done, time to lab this up. This is what I got. I have 4 vSRXs, all in packet mode, loaded into ESXi that I have factory defaulted and setup a basic login for. I have one of the vNICs setup as my management access to them in case I really fuck up a change. Each ge-0/0/0 interface is going to be in the 164.214.10.0/24 range since that is what I have my SRX100H handing off for DHCP addresses. I will not be using DHCP to assign the addresses though because I don’t want to play guess what IP every other day or after a reboot.
At the top of the stack I will have two of the vSRXs acting as routers. I will then use the bottom two to act as switches. Connected to the switches I have two fedora linux VMs that I will use as a source/receiver for the multicast data. Now that I have the layout in my head, time to go configure everything.
Once I get everything configured, I will load of the configs as a template.
Home Lab Network 