2020年5月4日 星期一

Restarting

So I was Googling about CCIE exam prep stuff and was ecstatic to find https://nickccieprogress.blogspot.com/ and couldn't stop myself from leaving a note of thanks(which I usually only do if i am super super thankful). Then i was a little surprised to find that i have a "blogger" account already existed. a few more clicks and found myself back to this blog, apparently, back in 2011 when owning a macbook was a new hype and I created this blog to share knowledge / experience. 

The idea of studyingCCIE has been floating around my head for about a year but for most time i denied the desire/need of doing so, plus various other reasons.

I have also started the idea of building a homelab since July 2019, that was mainly network / hardware / casual / for fun focused; I bought an Aruba 650 controller with 2 AP95, palo alto PA-200. and was trying to hook them up with virtual topology inside GNS3, had lots of problem with GNS3, to a certain point I started looking at eve-ng, and was surprised how easy it was, how well documented the howto's are. That gave me confident that I can manage a lab environment for learning, the only problem left was PC resource(CPU cores/ ram) and reliability (my new job requires me to travel all the time, can I establish an environment thats super reliable and allow remote access any time?) so i started looking at home server options, during the process i decided to make a server that can reliably run labs & replace my old Synology NAS

Then I did some research and bought a 2nd hand Dell R710, spent some time learning and researching on the right hypervisors for myself. tested hyper-v, XCP, and finally decided to run eve-ng baremetal as thats the easiest and provide "almost guaranteed" compatibility. During the process Im surpised to be able to get instant help from eve-ng community helpdesk, thats as good as, or even better, than internal IT helpdesk of companies i have worked for.

After a few weeks of struggle i can say that my environment is stable enough, and during the process the covid19 / wuhan virus pandemic started, was thinking how to best utilize my time. My new job gave me a very good motivation / momentum in learning new stuff and being more technical, together with a reliable server running in front of me, I think it is the perfect time to start my study.

During this whole process, I struggled a lot with the technical bits, and have always been thinking about documenting it somewhere. Rediscovering this blog I had back in 2011, is simply like "Hey im here, Im still alive! use me!" So here we go.



Done so far:
- Installed UPS for physical lab setup
- eve-ng environment fully ready
- freeNAS fully setup, OS is running on top of KVM, storage is 2 * 4TB drive directly attached to freeNAS to be managed as ZFS, data migration completed, SMB / NFS working reliably. offsite backup to AWS S3 in place
- remote access fully ready and tested on all my laptops & Android
- INE subscription in, workbook ready
- Safari book subscription in
- CCIE v5 required topology preliminary ready on eve-ng with IOL L2/L3 devices, INE workbook lab initial config ready
- Anki installed on PC & Android with deck from neckercube and Nick

To do:
- read that some required features may not be available on IOL. I do have CSR1000V 16.x in working condition however the eve-ng lab file from Nick is using CSR1000V 3.x so im unable to fire that up, not sure how to modify it efficiently so I will live with IOL setup for now, believe it will take a while for my learning to progress to a stage that will be hindered by the IOL limitation.
- upgrade Dell R710 from PERC to H700 to support >2TB drives, already bought the card but I bought the wrong SAS cable, not very urgent as i can still live with 2TB drive.
- add another HDD to run RAID 1 for the main disk on the Dell server for fault tolerant. Actually quite critical but I'm inclined to do this after upgrade to H700, as I dont risk migrating an array from one controller to another, I have no experience on that.

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