Passed the CCNP ONT Exam

Wow, this was one of the more difficult Cisco exams I’ve taken so far.

I felt I had a good grasp of VoIP and QoS from going through the CCVP track.

Despite that I barely squeezed out a passing score of 801.  I actually did the best on the wireless section (go figure)

Fifty-two questions and a ninety minute time limit.

Primary study material:
Cisco Press CCNP ONT Exam Certification Guide
Chris Bryant’s Ultimate CCNP ONT Study Guide
QoS cheat sheet from packetlife.net
Cisco Press QoS Exam Certification Guide
Cisco Press Wireless LAN Security

Total preparation time – four weeks.

This exam really tests your knowledge of VoIP, QoS, Cisco wireless solutions and wireless security.  I knew I was pushing the envelope with only four weeks of preparation but I wanted to get this one out of the way because……

Next week I’m attending VMware Vsphere training.

More on that later.

CCNP ONT Notes – Cisco Wireless Control System (WCS)

More notes from the CCNP ONT Exam Certification Guide.  I need help keeping all of the acronyms straight on exam day.

Cisco Wireless Control System  (WCS)
Centralized WLAN solution for LWAP’s.
Provides configuration, firmware, radio management, and IDS.
Supports the same monitoring and configuration management features as individual controllers.
Supports up to 50 WLC’s and 1500 AP’s
Administration via CLI, HTTPS and SNMP(v1-v3).
WCS uses SNMP for controller communications
Runs on Microsoft Windows or Linux platforms

Three versions:

WCS Base
Provides basic location services based on the association of the device with an AP
Autodiscovery of AP’s as they associate with controllers
Autodiscovery and containment or notification of rogue AP’s
Map-based display of AP coverage
Radio Resource Management (RRM)

WCS Location
All features of WCS Base plus:
Can utilize historical location data
On-demand monitoring of any single device via RF fingerprinting, accurate to within 10 meters

WCS Location + 2700 Series Wireless Location Appliance
Scales features to support up to 1500 devices
Records historical data for capacity management and trending

Running GNS3 in a VM on a Mac

Those of you not familiar with GNS3, it’s a graphical front end for the Dynamips router/IOS simulator.  It’s open source, temperamental, and a resource hog.  And, up until two weeks ago I figured I was the only person on the planet that could not get it to work.

I started experimenting with GNS3 last summer.  Since then, I’ve tried running it on three different PC’s, encountering the same problem each time.  It would run for about 20 minutes, just enough time to get a configuration built and the idle PC values worked out, then it would lock up.

I had all but given up on GNS3.  But two Saturdays ago I decided to give it another try.

This time, I installed GNS3 0.6.1 in an Xp virtual machine running in Parallels on my Macbook Pro.  I gave the VM 1.2GB of RAM and uninstalled all of the unnecessary cr@p from Windows to keep the install as clean as possible.

Well….GNS3 ran flawlessly!!.  I actually spent about five hours with it that afternoon modeling a customer BGP configuration.  (five routers)

At first I was still having a number of issues with the idle PC values.  I’d keep calculating a new value and applying it, but after a few minutes the CPU utilization would go to 100% again, sending the fans on the Macbook Pro into overdrive!

It wasn’t until I started a console session into all of the routers and tiled them on the screen that I stumbled on what was happening.

In IOS, the default exec-timeout on the console connection is 10 minutes, after which you are returned to a “Press RETURN to get started” prompt.  It seems GNS3 or Dynamips doesn’t like this.  As soon as a console session on one my routers would time out, the CPU would spike to 100%.

Exiting out of the console session didn’t help, only hitting the return key or powering off the router would return the CPU utilization to normal.

Applying exec-timeout 0 0 to line con 0 solved that issue.  Since I’ve started applying that setting to all of my GNS3 router configs, everything runs great.

In closing, I’m excited about GNS3 again.  Two of my coworkers are also running it in a virtual machine with similar success.