Not much happened today. Everything below was in the evening.
Checking the CCNA blueprint against what I've done
I went through the CCNA 200-301 blueprint topic by topic and marked each one against the work I've actually done in the homelab and on the hotel IPTV job. The biggest gap is IP routing. I've done plenty of subnetting and VLAN work, but I haven't touched static routes, OSPF or first-hop redundancy like HSRP and VRRP.
The other gap is hands-on. All my switch CLI time has been on H3C Comware, so I've never configured Cisco IOS. The multicast and IGMP snooping work I did at the hotel is the deepest networking I've done, and it isn't on the exam.
There are two versions in play. The current one, v1.1, retires at the start of February 2027 and a v2.0 with the same exam code starts the day after. I'm leaning towards v2.0, since four months is tight for sitting the old one. Those dates came from training sites, not Cisco's own pages, so I'll confirm them before booking. The next step is a lab, probably a simulator first, so I can get IOS and routing practice in.
The rack, and a decision
Late in the evening I took a photo of the rack. Looking at it, the cabling behind the switches and patch panels is a mess, and I've decided to tear the whole thing down in the next few days and redo it properly.
Before I pull a cable, these can't break:
- The cluster heartbeat links. Each node has a dedicated port for its own isolated ring, separate from the bonded uplink, and those need to go back exactly where they were.
- The Raspberry Pi that holds the cluster's tie-break vote, which sits on a specific port on the gateway.
- The Hue bridge, which has a fixed address and has to stay on the Home network.
- The node that only has a USB network adapter as its uplink.
Powering the whole rack off also takes down my own workstation VM, since it lives on one of those nodes. Anything I want to do that depends on it has to happen before the shutdown, and the order of the shutdown needs working out first. I haven't started any of this yet.
Still open
The CCNA lab doesn't exist yet and the v2.0 dates are unconfirmed. The teardown needs a written port map and a shutdown order before I touch anything. And the early-morning update reviews held a kernel update on the main Ubuntu server and one on the first Proxmox node as "ask", so both are waiting on me.