The Quitter Generation?

Posted on: Thursday, February 16, 2012|Written by: Kim Kiyosaki

Financial Freedom Comes with How You Handle Adversity

Are we training our kids today to be quitters? Are we teaching them when a tough problem arises or when things don’t go as planned, to simply quit?
How often in your life would you like a “do-over”? “Wow, I really screwed up on that, I think I’ll take a do-over and start again.” Wouldn’t that be handy?
Enter the “reset button”. Many of the video games you and your kids are playing come equipped with a reset button. When you’re about to lose, can’t figure out how to get to the next level, or the solution to the puzzle takes too much brain power, what do you do? You hit the reset button – you quit and start again. The reset button makes quitting easy… over and over and over.
Are we programming our kids to accept quitting as an acceptable answer to life’s problems?
“Children who learn to bounce back and not let setbacks get them down have gained a valuable skill for life,” says Michele Borba, psychologist and author of the Today.com article, “How Not to Raise a Quitter. “If our children are to succeed in this competitive world, they must learn to hang in there and not quit.”
We all know there is no reset button in real life, so what happens when life kicks you in the butt? We all have different coping mechanisms, ways to handle adversity, stress and challenges. Quitting is not a way to cope. It is a way to avoid and run away from your problems. It’s a way to not be accountable for your life. And it’s not the way to obtain financial freedom.
It’s handling the pressures, the difficulties and the setbacks that make you who you are.
Triumphing against bad odds is invaluable. Overcoming great obstacles makes you stronger and smarter. How one handles adversity determines a person’s level of success in life.
Do you take it on, create new solutions and face your fears… or do you reach for the reset button that, oh I forgot, doesn’t exist in real life. Now you’re really screwed.
How do you keep on going when you want to quit? Please let me know below.
And if you need help overcoming your fears, dealing with adversity and more to reach your financial freedom, check out the free, financial education resources here.

VRF Basics

When we hear about VRF, its almost synonymous to MPLS VPN. Virtual Routing and Forwarding is commonly used by Service Providers to provide services within an MPLS cloud with multiple customers. The most interesting feature of this is that, VRF allows creation of multiple routing tables within a single router. This means that overlapping use of IP addresses from different customers is possible. Some enterprises use VRF to seggrate their services like VOIP, wireless, geographical location and other varieties. Through the network setup below, we will see how to configure VRF and check if its really possible for duplicate ip addresses. We have 3 customers in the figure connected to a Provider Edge router. We will name the VRF's Blue, Red and Yellow. Click image for a bigger view.



Now let's configure RD's on the PE router.


Router(config)#host PE
PE(config)#ip vrf blue
PE(config-vrf)#rd 1:1
PE(config-vrf)#ip vrf red
PE(config-vrf)#rd 2:2
PE(config-vrf)#ip vrf yellow
PE(config-vrf)#rd 3:3


Basically the "rd" command is in the format ASN:nn or IP-address:nn. The VRF names and rd values are actually locally significant which means that it doesn't matter what name you create. What really matters is the "route target" value because this is what you will import or export. More about this on the next blog entry.

Now we have created VRF's, lets configure interfaces and apply the VRF's to the interfaces.


PE(config)#int fa0/0.2
PE(config-subif)#encapsulation dot1q 2
PE(config-subif)#ip vrf forwarding blue
PE(config-subif)#ip address 1.1.1.1 255.255.255.252
PE(config-subif)#int fa0/0.3
PE(config-subif)#encapsulation dot1q 3
PE(config-subif)#ip vrf forwarding red
PE(config-subif)#ip address 1.1.1.1 255.255.255.252
PE(config-subif)#int fa0/0.4
PE(config-subif)#encapsulation dot1q 4
PE(config-subif)#ip vrf forwarding yellow
PE(config-subif)#ip address 1.1.1.1 255.255.255.252


If you notice above all interfaces have the same ip address which is 1.1.1.1. Normally without VRF, the router will give a warning message that overlapping ip addresses are not allowed. The command "ip vrf forwarding " will add the vrf to a specific interface.

Let's configure the other routers Blue, Red and Yellow with 1.1.1.2/30 on their FastEthernet0/0 interfaces. Lets ping 1.1.1.1 from the routers.


Blue#ping 1.1.1.1

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 1.1.1.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 8/35/80 ms

Red#ping 1.1.1.1

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 1.1.1.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 8/48/156 ms

Yellow#ping 1.1.1.1

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 1.1.1.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 8/60/136 ms


It's good! We have ip reachability to PE from the CE routers. Now, from PE point of view, how will PE know which one to ping if we use 1.1.1.2 since all Blue, Red and Yellow routers use the same ip? This can be accomplished using the "ping vrf " command. See below.


PE#ping vrf blue 1.1.1.2

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 1.1.1.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 4/28/68 ms
PE#ping vrf red 1.1.1.2

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 1.1.1.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 4/28/88 ms
PE#ping vrf yellow 1.1.1.2

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 1.1.1.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 8/31/68 ms


Now, we have proven that duplicate IP addresses is possible using VRF. Be reminded that VRF's are usually and by standard configured on PE routers. CE routers normally don't make use of VRF's but there are always exceptions. Next entries will focus on importing Route Targets and using IGP's and BGP on a MPLS VPN setup. Cheers.