IPexpert Vol 1 – Lab 1a Overview

Over the last 2 weeks I have been working my way through the IPX Vol 1. Reason I have decided to stick to IPX for technology focussed labs is that they are more aligned with the actual blueprint.

Lab 1a covers the Implementation of Campus Infrastructure:

• VLAN
• DHCP
• TFTP
• NTP

IPX suggests that you complete the lab in 3 hours but I took my time going through the solutions over and over again and looking up the tasks on CUCM SRND and CUCME SRND. I did skip basic phone autoregistration here since its covered in detail in Lab 2a and 3a.

VLAN:

Coming from R&S background, this was routine work for me but I still wanted to read through and understand everything in VLANs. Basically it shows if you don't have any knowledge of the physical topology you can use CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) to discover the neighbors and configure the basic VLANs. This section asks you to configure trunk, create vlans on all the sites (HQ, BR1, BR2) and put the ports in data and voice vlans. Worth going through over and over again to get familiar with VLANs esp Voice VLANs. It will also help you under the difference between 3750 VLANs and 4ESW VLANs.

Important Commands:

• show cdp neighbors
• vlan (number)
• vlan (number) -> name NAME
• switchport mode trunk
• switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
• switchport trunk native vlan (number)

DHCP & TFTP:

For DHCP/TFTP we can use the CUCM and any Cisco IOS Router or Switch. Vol 1 makes you configure both so that you are familiar with the options. CUCM Subscriber will be used as the DHCP/TFTP server for HQ and BR1 Phones and BR2 router will be used as a DHCP/TFTP server for the BR2 Phones.

Important Commands:

• ip helper-address x.x.x.x
• ip dhcp excludd-address x.x.x.x.x x.x.x.y
• ip dhcp pool
• option 150 ip x.x.x.x
• default-router x.x.x.x
• show ip dhcp binding

NTP:

NTP (Network Time Protocol) is very important in voice because you want to make sure that all your timestamps are accurate. As far as NTP is concerned, you want to make sure that all your servers and routers/switches are getting the time from a centralized source in this case PSTN router.

Important Commands:

• ntp server x.x.x.x
• show ntp status
• show ntp associations