A huge congrats to a friend of mine Nick Treasure in passing his CCIE R&S in Dubai last week. (CCIE #24561)
When I studied for the R&S I found that there was no material to bridge the gap between the theory books and the practical lab workbooks. Once done with the theory, starting with practical labs you quickly realize that there is ample content the theory books doesn’t cover, and as a result it tends to take you longer going through the practice labs.
So I made notes in line with just that. Notes to cover the basic theory parts, but more cover all the commands and configuration examples you need to know along with command defaults and command variations. At the end I used these notes the two days before my actual lab to review all the work, theory and practical. And I found it to be an absolute life saver, since it was so complete and detailed, yet a summarized version (200 pages) of everything studied up to that point.
After Nick sadly failed his first attempt I offered the use of my practical notes to him for review before his second attempt. He dubbed it the “holy grail” of networking and that became a standing jokes in the office.
lol,this is a IM log chatting to him earlier this week:
(1:10:07 PM) Nickt69: Sup Fellow Network God
(1:10:34 PM) Nickt69: CCIE 24561 at your service.
(1:10:45 PM) Wiggwire: lo
(1:10:59 PM) Wiggwire: huge congrats and well done buddy
(1:11:04 PM) Wiggwire: hoz it feels,
(1:11:25 PM) Nickt69: Awesome!
(1:12:15 PM) Wiggwire: how was the exam?
(1:12:46 PM) Nickt69: Exam was easy thanks to your notes..
(1:12:57 PM) Wiggwire: seriously?
(1:13:43 PM) Nickt69: Yes.. No bullshit.


Assume you have either of the following setup’s. A single router (R3) with multiple links, either to the same upstream router (R2) or to 2 different upstream routers(R2+R4). And you want to load-share traffic across both links outbound (direction from left to right). Obviously the routing table needs multiple outgoing links as next-hops to perform the desired balancing. The command maximum-paths specifies how many paths or next hops are allowed per prefix in the routing table for a specific routing protocol, else default behavior dictates only the best route from each routing protocol are candidate for insertion into the routing table.

