The Past Year

It's almost a year since I last posted on this study blog! To be fair, family life has been very busy and to top it up, I've started a part time Master's degree last September. It was a hard decision to make at the time with the wife since we have a baby now. She did however support me and she knows I will be isolating myself to study :D

This is how it happened, I was talking to a colleague at work and found out he did a distance learning course that brought him up to CCNP level. This got me thinking. I'm not a fan of short term crash courses. I believe they will work if you had studied the topics before and you are refreshing your memory. Studying in my opinion is a long term goal so I started looking into Distance Learning courses. I found a small number of Universities that provided advanced networking courses.

The course I chose focused their modules around INE's CCIE R&S Workbook. It's full of labs covering every topic area on the R&S blueprint. So it's back to being a student again!

I heard rumours that they will be updating their workbook to include new topics for the new CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure, we'll wait and see.

I'll continue from where I left off with Layer 2, most of my notes are on OneNote, just need to tidy it up and post on here.

Good luck with the studies everyone!

STP Timers

It's possible to change some STP timers to improve convergence times for Spanning Tree. 

The most common ones are:

• Hello
• Max age
• Forward delay
• Diameter

Spanning Tree

Since starting this blog here, I'm going to continue from where I left off with my studies.

I've been looking into Spanning Tree for the last few weeks and there are so many topic areas to cover. I am not accustomed to writing blogs and I've been rereading what I have written multiple times so hopefully not too many mistakes here :)

I'll try and keep information short and sweet.

Click the Read more link to expand the post. 
Let's start!

IEEE 802.1D is the standard for Common STP

It's labelled as common as uses a single STP instance to carry all VLANs.

STP is required to prevent loops/broadcast storms from occurring when you have redundant links between switches. Prevention is done by STP port blocking.

In Spanning Tree, lowest number wins.

So far so good

I've previously wrote a few posts using WordPress but I was never keen on the limited text formatting and paragraphing. Most of my notes are on OneNote and copying them to a blog caused all sorted of formatting problems. I've been playing around with Blogger and it seems pretty good so far. Only negative I've noticed so far is no option to remove highlighting - selecting white is not the answer, but removing all formatting is a solution.

About me.

I maintain the network infrastructure and unified comms for multiple offices worldwide but I find that there is still so much to learn. With technology advancing at a rapid pace, it's likely study material I need to know may not be used in modern times. My aim with this blog is to help me focus on various topics and get down into the finer details. Personally I find that hand written notes are best for memory retention so I end up reading, writing, then typing notes before formatting them into a reader-friendly format. As for how often I will be posting, I'll try and make a habit of posting at regular intervals but no promises as learning takes quite some time to research.