Someone asked me recently what I was going to do now I have my digits … would I go for a second one?  Well, not just yet.  I may have got my digits, but there are still too many things in R&S that take me by surprise.  I have found out that you can be a CCIE and still not know everything yet. :-). So expect about a year of consolidation and blogging before I move to pastures new.

Knowing what
Thou knowest not
Is in a sense
Omniscience

Piet Hein, “Grooks”

Some of the stuff that Keith Tokash has been logging recently on the “CCIE Candidate” blog has pointed the way to some interesting investigations.  Furthermore, there have been a few questions on NetPro that have made me think.  It might even be the case to go to one of Narbik’s boot camps when he is in London.  (Or maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to go back to my home city.   So this page will be a working list of things to do.  Pian piano.

EIGRP 

1. EIGRP uses the metrics at which end of each link: the transmit end or the receive end.  Is it possible to provoke asymmetric routing by configuring different metrics at either end of a link?  Can this result in any unstable topologies?  See NetPro context.
2. Someone on the NetPro forum tells me that EIGRP uneven load balancing is always process switched.  I thought it was handled by CEF using a weighted hash algorithm.  I have to lab this.  Here is a document I based my belief on.

OSPF

1. OSPF uses the cost at which end of each link?  Actually, I already know the answer to this one: each router advertises an LSA for each network it is attached to, along with the outgoing metric of the link.  So, looking at the path of a packet from source to destination, the cost is the sum of the transmit costs on the path.
2. There are two ways of putting a link into are area: with ip ospf 100 area 0 on the interface, and with network x.x.x.x area 0 in the router section.  In the event of a conflict, which takes precedence?
3. Ask the same question of ip unnumbered interfaces.

HSRP and Routing protocols

1. I still need to understand fully the interaction between HSRP and routing protocols.  Hereis a situation where HSRP appears to cause unexpected results from a routing protocol.

LAN Control Protocols

1. When you have a dot1q trunk, which of the control protocols are send on VLAN 1 and which are sent on the native VLAN (assuming these are different).  I answered a question on NetPro about this and apparently got it wrong.  I need to lab it.

Spanning Tree

1. Spanning-Tree.  I guess I should ask the same question for Spanning-Tree, which after all is a sort of Distance-Vector algorithm.  Which end of each link is significant.

VTP

1. I keep telling people to beware that a VTP client can update a domain, and so it can.  But it is not as easy as I had once thought.  I need to write up the experiment properly.  I wonder whether the behavior is version dependant.
2. Furthermore, I really want to investigate VTP transparent.  How transparent is VTP transparent?  Can a transparent switch pass through VTP information, and if so, does the domain name need to match?  How does VTP pruning react to encountering a VTP transparent switch?

There is a load of lab work to do on this.