QoS 642-642 Progress

So, I finished the QoS book by Odom....awesome read!  I need to go through and make some notes for the chapters though...sort of a second "glance through."  I also picked up the nugget monthly streaming subscription; and am a pretty good way through them now.  Good progress, I need some lab reinforcement and I should be good.  Anyone know any good QoS labs (I have the ONT portfolio....).

Core IOS Upgrades Today

So we updated our two Catalyst 6509's in preparations for the deployment of Cisco's Virtual Switching System next month.  Ran into a weird problem though...well not really a problem, but something funny that I wanted to share.  We all know that these guys parse your configs as they load, well our 6500's must have "parsed" too much.  When we attempted to log in through the console port we kept getting an:  % Error in authentication.  It did this about 10 times before it finally gave us the glorious username prompt.  Just a funny issue more than anything.  Anyone else ever heard of this?  Both cores did it...we upgraded to an SXI3 release.  BTW:  Here were are sup720 upgrade steps

1) TFTP'd the new ios into the sup-bootflash:
2) issued "boot system flash sup-bootflash:" for the new ios...used the "no" version to remove the old statement.
3) checked our boot variables with the show boot command.  Should show the path you put in above.
4) We currently run HSRP, so only for a brief moment was connectivity lost (reboot secondary, then primary).

Reading QoS

Well I bought the Cisco QoS Exam Certification Guide, as well as the CCIE Routing and Switching Certification Guide (4th ed.).  Though I am returning the R&S guide because the companion cd was not in there!  They are sending me another though, so all is well.  I am about 105~ pages into the QoS guide, mostly refresher, but Odom writes quite elegantly on the subject.  I really want to just knock this one out in a couple weeks, so after reading the books I will contemplate purchasing the CBT Nuggets to get Jeremy's perspective on it, and then a little labbing before the exam.  I really have some QoS work to do at work...so this is pretty beneficial to everyone involved.  More to come...sorry for the delayed writing.  BTW...probably changing blog sites soon...will know shortly.