More MPLS

I'm about 20% of the way through the Cisco Press MPLS Fundamentals book. I've found it a bit of a slog this week. The book is an easy read for the first chapter or so, then it gets fairly dry for a while. I prefer to go through a bit of practical (show me the commands to keep my interest). Unfortunately the book is focussed more on the theory before showing you much of the CLI. The last chapter has been very repetitive, but at least it has had some commands and their output.

This week at work (first week in a new job) has been interesting. My brief for the week was to just "poke around" and see if I can find any issues in the network. I've cleaned up the world's worst Visio diagram (who in the world creates a text label for a router out of about 10 or 15 different text fields (one for each octet of the IP address, one for each of the dots, and one for each part of the router name). I've also spotted a wole heap of other issues. Spanning tree and VTP are a big issue - too many VLANs (more than the number of spanning-tree instances supported on most of the switches) and more than the number of VLANs that some of the switches support. It also appears that VTP pruning doesn't work as promised (most places I have worked haven't had that many VLANs, or have used transparent mode, so I haven't seen that before).

We've also been looking at using 31-bit masks on some of the links rather than the /30 masks we are currently using. Since we have a whole heap of those links it will make a considerable saving in the address space.

Well - it's off to do some GNS3 work on MPLS.