IEWB

Well, I started into the InternetworkExpert Lab Workbooks today. I'm starting with Volume I Lab 1 and have already ran into a few problems. First, the solutions document does not appear to cover the entire solution, leaving out several steps, a few of which I am still trying to figure out. Either that, or the initial configs for the devices are not correct, I'm not sure which. I can't seem to get an answer from the IE Forums.

I can't see to get IP reachability across all ethernet connected interfaces, which is quite frustrating as this is very important. I only hope that the issue is my fault, and not the fault of the workbooks. Once I find the solution, I'll be sure to post it.

I'm trying to get 6 - 8 hours of study time in every day. With the issues I'm running in to, I have not even completed the first lab after a full day of studying. Studying can be hard sometimes with a wife and 18 month old child, but I think I'm dealing well so far. I try to spend as much time as possible with my family, so I study on my laptop in the living room, accessing my lab which is downstairs in my basement. I figured I don't need to be next to the equipment. That's how the actual lab is setup anyway.

*UPDATE*
So after a couple hours of frustration, I wiped all my routers and started from the beginning. Guess what - everything works! While I am happy everything works, I am quite upset I couldn't figure out what was wrong before. Layer2/3 networking is nothing new to me as I have been doing it for almost 10 years and it's my job! All my trunks were up carrying all the VLANs, the preconfigured IP addresses were correct, and all the ports were in the right access VLAN. I guess I'll just chalk this up to an anomaly. Hopefully I don't run into anything like this again - I hate to restart another lab being halfway through!

One important tip. I've seen goofy things happen with Dynamips that I've never seen with physical routers. If something is not working, and you have verified with the solutions document, then restart the router(s) through Dynagen, but first export your config for import later (wri mem does not save between reloads due to the presence of the cfg parameter in the .net file).