Rob Thomas <rob@cymru.com> wrote:
> Has anyone recently attended the ever-full Juniper courses, e.g. the
> three or five day course bundle? If so, I would like to hear your
> impressions of the course.
Hi Rob,
I completed the five-day Juniper training in their main offices in
California last week. Overall, I would say the courses are well
designed and well delivered, but not as deep as you might expect,
depending upon your role and level of knowledge.
The class is taught in a series of short lectures, followed by lab
work where you work in teams of two to configure a router using
knowledge covered in the lecture. These exercises are pretty short,
and leave time to return pages and make phone calls throughout the
day.
While they expect you to be familiar with modern routing protocols,
the instructor spent a good deal of time reviewing "basics" of BGP4,
IS-IS, and OSPF. The reviews aren't deep enough to be considered
training on their own, though, so you wouldn't be able to send new
engineers to the class and expect them to come back knowing these
in depth.
The topics covered included:
Architecture Overview
CLI basics
basic config
interface config
IGP (OSPF and IS-IS) config
BGP config
Basic System Troubleshooting
logging and tracing
IGP troubleshooting
BGP troubleshooting
Routing Policy
Route Filtering
AS-Path Filtering
Import & Export
MPLS:
Background
RSVP basics
Configuring static paths
Constrained Shortest Path First (CSPF) path selection
Configuring dynamic paths
Note that the level of all the material is primer: 'How to do X with a
Juniper," where the depth of X is fairly shallow. However, once you
get the basics hooked up (oh, this is how I filter exported routes by
BGP community), it should be pretty simple to extend to your
organizational policy.
What's more, you get time to fool around with a network of live
routers in a classroom lab, with specific goals and someone to help
out when you get stuck. The instructor I had was very knowledgeable
about the product and its use, and we had a hard time digging deeper
than he could answer authoritatively on the spot. He did the right
thing with tracking down what he didn't know, usually during the same
day (he took advantage of proximity to engineering--and engineering
was willing and able to help him).
My only complaint is that I think that the courses could be compressed
into fewer days, especially the MPLS section which was spread out over
two days. The material was just not complex enough to merit all the
lab time allocated.
Disclaimer: I'm not an NSP--I'm a software developer. Gold Wire
Technology, Inc. is developing policy-based configuration management
software for NSP's.
.............................................................................
Brian Del Vecchio : : Gold Wire Technology Inc.
bdv@goldwiretech.com : V) 781-647-2211 x230 : 411 Waverley Oaks Road #331
www.goldwiretech.com : F) 781-647-2229 : Waltham, MA 02452
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