Life in Northeast Ohio...

Well, pleasant surprise this morning...about 5 inches of wet snow on the ground. So first things first, I had to get out there and clear my driveway. I am quite thankful I purchased a snow thrower this year, although it's less effective with wet snow. Still better than shoveling! Bad news is, we are getting another 6-8 inches before sunset. So that means I'll be back out there again.

On top of that, I've got some work to do. That takes precedence over my studying. Especially since, for the most part, my job right now is to study for the CCIE. I work for a company that does consulting for Government agencies and part of my job is to participate in pre-sales activities. They certainly aren't fun, but it's a necessary evil when working in this industry. Next week I'm taking a trip to company headquarters in Herndon, Va. I've got a quick meeting to attend and then hopefully I'll get started on setting up our CCIE R&S rack. Unfortunately, all these things take away from my studying. I'm a little upset about it since I was on a roll with the CBT Nuggets video. All-in-all, I'm still expecting to finish the CBT Nuggets video next week. Then it's on to the IPExpert Class-on-demand.

I'm not looking to get too much studying done today, but I did want to post a few tips I picked up on from yesterday's studies.

1. Virtual-link IP address is the neighbor's router-id. I knew this already, but this may be an important tip to someone else!
2. User "area x default cost" to set a preferred exit point from an area. (Lower cost on preferred exit point, high cost on alternate)
3. 100/BW(in MB) is the default OSPF metric calculation. Remember this. A 56k link would have an OSPF metric of 1785. You can change this by setting the auto-cost reference bandwidth under router ospf.
4. Tags are very useful when redistributing into OSPF. I always tag because you never know when you may need to use the tag later. I've learned the hard way.
5. For setting tag values, I use the redistributed protocols admin distance. (tag 120 for RIP, tag 90 for EIGRP, etc).
6. When doing mutual redistribution between OSPF and EIGRP, exclude external routes when redistributing EIGRP into OSPF. This prevents original OSPF routes, now in the EIGRP process, from re-entering the OSPF process in another router with a lower AD.
7. External EIGRP routes have an AD of 170. When redistributing between OSPF and EIGRP, setting the OSPF external distance can help ( ospf distance external 171).
8. Always pay attention to network type when using OSPF across Frame-relay networks.

Well that's it for now, back to work, snow-blowing, some studying, and hopefully installing my new Graphics card and monitor today.