A few weeks ago I received an offer to attend Juniper’s 2 Day SRX Bootcamp for free.  My division had been hit hard by this recession and so building Cisco end-to-end wasn’t a viable solution for senior management anymore.  We were in the midst of upgrading each of our 100Mbps Internet circuits to gig links and needed an edge devices to terminate the link.  Unfortunately, obtainingfunds for acquiring either a Cisco ASR1002 (fixed) or Catalyst 6509 with FWSM proved to be difficult and was too time consuming.  At the end of the capex process and based on my tech requirements, I ended up proposing Juniper’s SSG550M Netscreen firewall (sorry Cisco).  The Netscreen firewall has the ability to NAT, terminate BGP, and could support throughput levels over 1Gbps.  The moment I started spec’ing out costs Juniper sales reps heard from my resellers and seized the moment to come on-site and woo me.

The class the reps had offered to help persuade me was hosted by Proteus Networks.  During the training portion of the class, the proctor kept referring to Cisco as ‘Brand C’ and would refuse to say the word out loud in a humorous, guilty kind of way; his loyalty to Juniper products was obvious.  The class was very informative at the JNCIA/CCNA level; I could easily recommend taking advantage of this offer to anyone.  If you want to try and capitilize on the free training, now’s the time.  Just find yourself a reseller and make a request to purchase a Juniper device.

I had learned during the class that there was a conversion process for the Netscreen SSG550M.  With the installation of a compact flash card that you could purchase for < $200, I could convert the firewall to a router appliance (i.e. J6350).  Juniper’s J6350 router would allow for secured virtual routing similar to Cisco’s Zone Based Firewall feature where I can securely terminate my gig link and have the management control for routing data in/out of the zones.  In the next few weeks, I’ll be converting my firewall and plan on writing about the experience.

Aside from receiving the in-class JUNOS knowledge, I was presented with a voucher at the end of the 2 days for 100% off all Juniper certifications (excluding JCNIE-ER and JCNIE-M).  Since then I’ve been busy reading all the free materials offered on Juniper’s website and have been renewing/retaking all my certs.  I haven’t exactly diverted from my SP studies entirely.  All of the Juniper learned knowledge (i.e. RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, multicast, IPv6),  serves as a refresher for my CCIE SP Lab and should help complement my reading for the dreaded OEQs.  Recently, I heard on Twitter that the OEQs were going away only for the R&S and Voice labs, so in the meantime, I’ll still have to continue reading each of the technologies until Cisco announces otherwise.  I’ve rebooked my 2nd SP attempt for 10/15/2010, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the OEQs will hopefully be dropped by mid-summer.

I managed to obtain my JNCIA-ER (JNO-341) certification today. Juniper is retiring this exam in the next week or so and introducing JNO-342 which is an extension of this exam.  The reason I took this version was because the free voucher for the Fast Track program only applied to this one.

This exam is a little more theory based when compared to the JNCIS-ER exam.  Everything you need to study is in the packet they give you.  The things you really need to understand are boot up processes; differences between the M7i, M10i, and J-series routers; RIP; OSPF; routing policies; J-Web links and associated CLI commands; and basic CLI syntax.  Remember, this only applies to the JNO-341 version and will most likely change in the upcoming JNO-342 version.

I completed my JNCIS-ER (JNO-350) today and scored 80 out of 100. Not bad, considering I only studied over the weekend for the test. Originally, I was scheduled to take the JNCIA-ER (JNO-341) last week, but ran into some personal issues and missed the deadline to reschedule my voucher. When I arrived at work today, I decided to contact the Juniper representative that issued my JNCIA-ER voucher and asked for an extension. I explained my situation to her and she was nice enough to issue me a new voucher.

Anyways, here’s how I passed the JNCIS-ER test:

1) Downloaded the ‘Operating Juniper Networks Routers In The Enterprise’ student guide, lab detailed guide, and lab diagrams pdf files. Read through them and tried to understand the Juniper concepts. For most CCNP’s and CCIE’s, the RIP, OSPF, BGP, NAT, and IPSec material will overlap with everything you’ve studied.

2) Downloaded the ‘Advanced Juniper Networks Routers In The Enterprise’ student guide, lab detailed guide, and lab diagrams pdf files. Read through these documents as well. There really wasn’t any need to memorize anything in detail. I took down a few notes in regards to Class of Service, BA classifiers, and next-hop-style vs. interface-style service sets, but other than that I just had to learn a few of the Juniper command sets. If you’ve played around with Vyatta at all or used Juniper Netscreens before, then understanding the command sets are relatively straight forward. Based on everything I’ve just mentioned you should have enough information to get through this exam.

3) If you really must practice the commands to memorize them, you can emulate the JUNOS software. I used the Smogey and Packetmischief websites to help build my VMware emulators and played around with them for half a day. I was planning on posting some screenshots, but Smogey’s site has them all already.

After reading the instructions on each website, you may come to realize that you will need the JUNOS files (i.e. jinstall-7.xRx.x-domestic-signed.tgz) to proceed. Since I’m no longer affiliated with a company that actually uses Juniper equipment, I had to search the Internet for them. I found the files through various international forums. Just use your Googling skills to track them down. Since I had to hunt them down myself, it wouldn’t be fair if I just shared them out to you.