GETVPN Training

This week from monday through wednesday, I took part in a GETVPN course at a training center in Munich. From what I know, this is not a standard Cisco course but at the request of the customer we’re working for, Global Knowledge (a Cisco training partner) organized everything. Even though there were not many new things for me in those three days, the course was welcomed because the project I am working at right now is exactly about this: traffic encryption in a large-scale MPLS network with GETVPN. The course was a good opportunity for me to practice again my knowledge about GETVPN. The troubleshooting sessions helped too, we’ve tested all kind of scenarios, simulating as much as possible the live MPLS network we work with at the office.

In case what I said above sounds worse than ancient chinese to some of my readers, GETVPN (which stands for Group Encrypted Transport Virtual Private Networks) is a technology used to encrypt customer traffic through the private network of a Internet Service Provider (usually). GETVPN allows secure communication between all customer branches without being affected by the scalability issues of the classical methods of encryption (like IPsec tunnels) when the number of locations increases.

The training room had good equipment, PCs for each student, WLAN with access to the lab network as well as to the Internet for our laptops, even silly little things like Mr. Watch:

Yeah, I named a toy … Anyway, the training center facilities were excellent, surprisingly good food at the canteen and all kinds of relaxation methods:

Some of my colleagues playing a quick round of table soccer. The game can become quite violent, as I had the opportunity to witness. But kinda cool.

All in all it was a productive way of spending three days away from work. But tomorrow I am going back to my office, what a mess. Oh well ;-)

Utrecht

First impressions about Utrecht, Netherlands: cold, cloudy, windy, depressing.

Yesterday was my first course day at the Experteach building, about 15 minutes bus ride from my hotel. The trainer is from London, funny guy who seems to know his stuff. We are only three people in this class, it seems this SNRS course is not so popular but I am happy with it so far. At the training location we have free wireless but unfortunately the building’s provider must be blocking VoIP calls. I have tried from my Nokia E51, which has a built-in VoIP client, but it’s not really working. It registers fine with Sipgate, my VoIP provider, I can call but I can’t hear anything and I am not being heard either. I think I have to hack the settings a bit and use a proxy, I will see today.

At least wireless is free there, unlike at the hotel. Here there is only a Swisscom hotspot available and for 7 days you are charged 68 euros. Ridiculous!

As a curiosity, one of the students looks almost exactly like Commander Tucker from “Star Trek: Enterprise“:

It happened to me lots of times before to notice people who look almost identical, as if they were “made” from the same model. Who knows, common genetic material perhaps;-)