You need the basics - ALWAYS!

[Big Evil]

No matter how far you career goes, who you work for, what level NOC or network engineer you get to - having to recover passwords is must know and something every engineer should remember and be able to do in their sleep!

Just spent most of an afternoon - blanking 15 router for my home lab.

[lammle]

I teach a CCNA 6-day class about every six weeks or so. I am pretty strong with my basics, and absolutly I am doing password recovery every single day of my class, as well as recoving an IOS from ROMMON. I can do those two things in my sleep, although ROMMON is still a pain sometimes.

The CCNP ROUTE class I teach keeps me updated on the more advanced routing protocols.

I do understand that most people cannot teach, write corriculm and labs, and then teach it at least every two months to keep your skills tight, but you can still work on your home lab every single day. Or get packet tracer and build and configure new networks constantly.

I am also blessed to have a thriving consulting business so I am constantly working on the latest technologies as well, but my foundation is strong! I like to tell my students that it's like going to the gym, you have to go everyday or you won't stay in shape - same with IP.

Cheers!
Todd Lammle

[Big Evil]

So true mate -

Stuff like IP SLA, QOS, EEM i need to think whilst doing as i do not it everyday.
I still have to think when doing new ACL's, route map and redist - certainly on live gear! ;-)

[lammle]

SLA's are very important today, and can be tricky. They are simple in concept so if you just read about it and not actually configure it on a live network, you only think you know about SLA's and route maps.

Also, VPN's and IPSec, Crypto Maps and certificates, HSRP, ASA failover, NAT and redundant NAT, and ACL's.

None of these are new technologies and they are changing rapidly with the new Cisco UCS, but it's still something I do all the time.

[Big Evil]

Yeah the IP SLA stuff that hits a IP & port every x seconds for testing purpose- not done it many times. HSRP is sweet, i am cool with that (plus VRRP when using JUNOS - funny a pre-sales/architect ask me why i was not using HSRP when configuring a MX80! LOL)

Have not done NAT/PAT for a while now - back in the day when i was doing a ton of single DSL configuring i was good. As the same with VPN - it is all MPLS now.

Hard to stay on top of everything!

[bobdempsey]

So far I have only had to reload a switch via ROMMON and the console port one time. I think most routers have tftp in the ROMMON so it's quite easy. But this was a switch (a 3550 IIRC) and didn't have tftp in the ROMMON (that I could find).

I was very fortunate that this was a lab switch because it took several hours to accomplish this and I would have been in deep, hot water if a production switch was down for several hours.

First you have to make sure that your PC terminal emulator supports XMODEM (but I think they all do). Then you have to get the IOS image on your PC. Then you have to tease the console port baud up to a faster speed than 9600, but not so fast that you get transfer errors (because the cisco console ports don't have h/w flow control). I seem to recall that 38K was the best I could do reliably, and it took hours to download the IOS image.