This was posted on twitter today and just had to share it with you.  It takes a few moments until you see what is so funny, but just wait – you will cry laughing.

This is a different type of post – one that I have not done here before but have considered for quite some time – it is an opinion post. I will occasionally take a few moments and explain my view of a topic that is hot in the news, world, or perhaps something that is being discussed on Twitter / Facebook / Google+.
It is not my intention to offend anyone, persuade anyone, or change your mind – but more of an avenue for my to spill my thoughts and feelings.
Ok, pleasantries out of the way now – lets get onto the topic here: Personal View – BoA ATM/Visa Fee
 
So, Bank of America wants to charge its “customers” a $5 fee per month that they use their debit/visa card for purchases unless you maintain $20,000 in deposits or have a mortgage with them ( NY Times 9/30/2011 ). They are joining all the other banks that are doing this or talking about it as well – Chase, Wells Fargo, and others – and all this is because the government has imposed limits on fees charged to merchants. Since the government has decided to step in and “protect the merchant” from extra fees, those fees are being made up on the consumer now. Of course, the merchants are not lowering prices on their items, so we can see how well that all worked out for us now, eh? But I digress.

 
In continuation of my previous posts on MPLS, lets talk about EIGRP as the PE to CE protocol.
 
Now while one might initially think that this is just as easy as RIP and Static routes, there are some added complexities with EIGRP. What complexities am I referring to? Well when configuring EIGRP on a PE router one needs to be aware of the Autonomous System number relationship. Normally you just create router eigrp AS and that is all you do, but when you have a PE router you need to use the address-family command and then specifically the autonomous-system # for that VRF. This has a big of complexities, but nothing that is a big deal. Just one more thing to remember.
So, lets add EIGRP AS 14 to VRF Green (R1 and R4) as well as the PE (R2 and R5) and configure redistribution. For reference I have already removed the RIP configurations.
First up, the CE routers:
R1:
Rack1R1(config)#router eigrp 14
Rack1R1(config-router)#no au
Rack1R1(config-router)#net 192.168.253.1 0.0.0.0
Rack1R1(config-router)#net 192.168.21.1 0.0.0.0
R4:
Rack1R4(config)#router eigrp 14
Rack1R4(config-router)#no au
Rack1R4(config-router)#net 192.168.253.4 0.0.0.0
Rack1R4(config-router)#net 192.168.54.4 0.0.0.0

 
I just got my invitation to the next Tech Field Day, well actually Network Field Day #2, and I cannot tell you how excited I am, as well as humbled to be asked to attend.
My first experience with Tech Field Day was back in February of this year when I attended Tech Field Day #5. That event was more data center focused and was something that I will never forget. I learned quite a bit about a lot of technologies and companies that I was not overly familiar with. It was amazing to see how far some of the technology has come so fast, it was just mind melting. There where some topics that where right up my alley with regards to expertise, and those I learned even more about. It was an experience that I was hoping I would get a chance to experience again, and thankfully I will.

As some of you have seen on my Twitter feed, I am playing with some home virtualization ideas. By Home Virtualization I am referring to running ESXi Hyper-visor at home for my “servers” as well as trying to see if I can virtualize the families computers. This is an interesting concept that comes with some unique challenges, and a few of them I am still trying to figure out!
The server part has been the easy one, just did a Physical to Virtual (P2V) conversion via the free tool VMware vCenter Converter at VMWare – link. The tool will allow you to take a currently running server and convert it to a Virtual machine on your ESXi server. I moved my families Domain Controller / DNS server over, powered it on in the VMware console application, then powered off the physical box. Once the IP address was moved to the new server, everything just worked.

Curious note on the P2V tool. I have also used this when I purchased a new computer or fix a friends computer. I will P2V the computer first, this way no matter what happens I can still spin up the old computer under VMPlayer – link. When I get a new computer I just copy the Virtual Machine to my new computer so that I can access all the old software and such whenever I need to. If I need to see how something was configured, just launch the VM and take a look. It is an snapshot in time of the old computer.

The other day I posted some “basic” MPLS information and figured I could use that to build a bit more. In subsequent posts I will post the configs for EIGRP, OSPF, and BGP – but today I will post on RIP.
So, this whole lab/post will build off the previous one – LINK – but will remove all the static routes and replace them with the RIP protocol. I will only post the configs for the CE (R1, R3, R4, R5) and PE (R2 and R5), the core will not change.

Since I am starting out my SP studies again I figured I would do a post on basic MPLS VPNs with VRFs and just use static routes. These are some of the base fundamentals in a MPLS VPN deployment, and from here you can quickly build out and add complexities if you wish. What I will cover here is VRF, RD, LDP, and MP BGP configurations and I will start by defining and explaining the technologies.
Virtual Routing and Forwarding, or VRF for short, is a technology that allows a router to have multiple instances of a routing table at the same time. These routing tables co-exist on the router, but yet are segmented and independent of each other. An analogy would be Server virtualization. You can have a single server running VMWare, and then under that have multiple instances of Windows running independently of each other. You can configure those servers to talk to each other, or completely isolate them away and they will have no knowledge of each other.
A Route Distinguisher, or RD, is a way to identify a VPN route in an MPLS network. What this does is add an 8-byte value to an IPv4 prefix to create a VPNv4 prefix, typically referred to as an VPN-IPv4 address. Since each customer is assinged a unique RD, their addresses are guaranteed to be unique. So if you have Customer A that has a 10/8 address space and Customer B that also has a 10/8 address space, the addition of the RD brings uniqueness to each of them. A RD looks nomally looks like 1:100

I know I missed it and it seems as though others might have missed it as well. So I figured I would take a moment and share the news – INE will be having CCIE Service Provider 3.0 Workbooks, Classes, and best of all, RACKS!
Last Friday, September 2nd, Brian McGahan posted on the INE blog the information – you can read the post here – LINK. From what his post says, their topology will consists of 20 routers including two GSR 12000 running IOS XR 3.9.1 as well as a pair of Metro-E 3400 switches. The rest of the routers are a mix of 7200VXR and 2600XM routers.
I am assuming that the 2600 series routers will be the CE devices, the 7200 will be the PE and the 12000 will be in the core. This hardware lists closely resembles the hardware list Cisco has provided, minus the Cisco 7600 routers (but those and the 7200 on the actual lab are Simulators).
In case you are wondering what is all on the lab, here is the list from Cisco’s CCIE SP Page – Link (login required)
1. Implement, Optimize and Troubleshoot Core IP Technologies
_1.1. Packet over SONET
_ 1.1.1. Cisco HDLC encapsulation
1.1.2. PPP encapsulation
1.1.3. Frame Relay encapsulation
1.1.4. Maximum transmission unit (MTU)
1.1.5. Cyclic redundancy check (CRC)
1.1.6. Keepalive timer
1.1.7. Frame Relay DLCI on point to point sub-interface
1.1.8. SONET Controller
1.1.9. POS channel