First Prize - Huawei ICT Competition Global Final 2018/2019
Insights from a Network Track First Prize Winner of the Huawei ICT Competition Global Final 2018/2019
Disclaimer: This article is written with the aim of sharing my experience as a participant in the Huawei ICT Competition 2018/2019. I do not have any affiliations with Huawei in any manner.
It’s the time of the year, where as a new season of the Huawei ICT Competition has begun. Depending on where you are reading this from, your country’s very own qualifying round may have already begun! Check it out and get registered!
So, what is this Huawei ICT Competition all about?
There were two different tracks in the competition, network and cloud. The competition was a practical, hands-on based competition, where you will be getting your hands dirty configuring Huawei networking devices such as switches, routers, and firewalls if you are in the network track or deploying solutions on Huawei Cloud if you are in the cloud track, according to requirements specified.
I was in the Network Track. In my experience, I have went through three rounds of competitions, namely the Malaysian Universities Preliminaries, the Malaysian National Finals, and the Southern Pacific Regional Finals before making my way to the Global Finals. It was a six-month long journey from December 2018 until May 2019. However, each and every country/ region’s route to the Global Finals may differ from one another.
To put things into perspective, prior to the Huawei ICT Competition, I have ZERO experience with any Huawei networking equipment as I came from a Cisco background, in which I also hold a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) -Routing & Switching Certification.
The University Preliminaries consists of multiple choice objective questions, testing you on your networking fundamentals such as IP addressing, the TCP/IP model, the OSI model, IP protocol knowledge and etc. It was tough, and I only managed to score 655 out of 1000.
655/1000? I thought I was out of the competition already.
To my surprise, I qualified to the National Finals alongside two of my juniors. We then went on to win the National Finals, and finished as second in the Southern Pacific Regional Finals, losing out First Prize by a few points to Telkom University, Bandung, Indonesia.
In terms of the competition format, the National Finals and the Regional Finals were pretty similar. We were given the specifications and requirements of a network, and we were required to perform necessary configurations for the devices in eNSP within three hours. Also, we were give the configuration manuals for the devices as reference throughout the competitions.
eNSP is a network simulation platform from Huawei, similar to what Packet Tracer is to Cisco.
The competition covered Routing & Switching, Security, as well as Wireless. Coming from a Cisco background, the Malaysian National Finals was my very first time interacting with Huawei’s network equipment!
Cisco’s CLI and Huawei’s CLI are quite similar.
If you have any experience in Routing & Switching, it would be a very straight forward encounter. Topics such as VLAN, LACP, STP, DHCP, NAT, OSPF, IS-IS, and BGP will be tested on. Something new for me was Huawei’s Hybrid VLAN implementation, which is some interesting concept you may want to read more on.
As for Security, it was more about defining security zones, and security policies. Trust, DMZ, and Untrust, that should be all the zones, right? Hold on! In Huawei’s universe, there’s another zone called Local. The Local Zone refers to any traffic originated/ directed to/ from the firewall itself, such as OSPF Hello packets. We were stuck with the firewall configuration for quite some time until we learned more about this. So, do take note!
Our team had no experience dealing with wireless equipment such as Access Controllers (AC), and Access Points (AP), which eventually gave us a hard time in both the National Finals and Southern Regional Finals. We weren’t able to get our ACs and APs working till the end of the competition. We dumped in configurations that we thought that might help us to score points before handed in our solution. Fortunately, it only covered of a small fraction of the overall score.
Networking 123: If you know the way OUT, make sure that you also know the way IN.
Even if we followed the requirements/ specifications on the question paper and configured it accordingly, we found that it wasn’t sufficient for our entire network topology to communicate end-to-end. We added additional security policies as well as routing configurations on top of the specified requirements/ specifications after consulting the invigilators.
Not all the requirements/ specifications are explicitly written on the question papers. If in doubt, consult the invigilators. They would be happy to clarify.
As the 1st Runner-Up for the Regional Final, we thought that it might have been the end of our journey in the competition. We were disappointed for missing out the First Prize, which carried the ticket to the Global Finals.
Little that we know, out of nowhere, we were informed that we would be on our way to Huawei’s HQ at Shenzhen, PRC together with Indonesia as the representatives of the Southern Pacific after all!
It was indeed a surprise, and a privilege. With less than five weeks to the Global Final, we vowed to give our best to bring glory to our region. We were given the scope for the Global Final, similar to what we have gone through before, but for EIGHT hours. Additional topics such as Switch Stacking, AC High Availability, Tunneling, Network Monitoring and etc will be tested.
This time around, it’s the real deal. We would be using physical networking equipment for the Global Final!
I spent most of my time, studying and preparing for the Global Final, especially with Wireless. I found that DHCP Option 43 Suboption 2 was the missing piece of our puzzle for the previous two competitions, which explains why we were not able to make our APs discovered by the ACs!
Huawei Malaysia was also kind enough to lend their helping hands by inviting us to Huawei Malaysia’s office for a hands-on session with their networking equipment for us to familiarize ourselves with the hardware. It was definitely a fruitful session with them!
23 May 2019, it was time to leave for the Global Final. We touched down at Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport in the evening before checking in to our rooms in Amber Plaza. Each of the participants were given their own private Deluxe room!
8.00 am the following day, all participants gathered and moved to Huawei’s Bantian Campus in Shenzhen for the Opening Ceremony, followed by the briefing session for the competition. We were then brought to the competition venue.
TODO: Configure — Eight routers, four switches, two firewalls, two wireless access controllers, two access points.
At 10.00 am, our eight hour journey starts!
As expected, the topology was huge with one HQ and three branches to be interconnected to an ISP backbone. A lot of cabling has to be done! For this occasion, we have no time to lose, forget about cable management. ;)
We divided tasks among ourselves with someone taking care of the HQ, ISP and branches respectively. Following the same principle of starting from the bottom of the TCP/IP stack, we managed to bring up our network within three hours. What was left are the wireless access controllers, access points, tunnels between the HQ and branches and the firewall.
At the fifth hour mark, for the very first time, our wireless was up and running! All three all of us were ecstatic. It was a huge achievement for us to finally overcome our weakness in the past two competitions.
The competition was intense, as we were able to see other SSIDs broadcasted from the other teams who got their Wireless up and running well before us, there is no time to spare.
We spent the remaining hours troubleshooting our IPSec tunnel and 6to4 tunnel which were the very last two tasks that we couldn’t really figure out what was causing the issue after various debugging efforts and documentation lookup.
After seven and a half hours, three of us collectively decided to call it a day. We were extremely exhausted, we did the best we can.
We saved out our configurations and prepared it for submission. We sat back and relax. This would be the final moments for three of us to be competing together in this competition. We definitely enjoyed it till the very final minute.
It’s time to enjoy the hotel food!
The next day, we were brought for a tour around Huawei’s Bantian campus, and we were showed and amazed with futuristic solutions from Huawei in their exhibition centers.
We then set off to Huawei’s brand new Songshan Lake campus for the Closing & Award Ceremony. What Huawei has built at the Songshan Lake campus, is definitely mind blowing.
You can definitely imagine yourself being in Europe!
The campus was so huge, as they even have their own shuttle train, with the train sets imported from Switzerland. I guess this is what you get with a $10 billion dollar campus?
In the evening, the moment where everyone waited has arrived, the award ceremony. The emcee began announcing the winners from Third Prize, Second Prize, and First Prize.
We were the 49 teams from 30 countries, out of 100,000 students from 61 countries worldwide who made it here to the Global Final. That is definitely a significant achievement to be proud of!
There were four teams that would be awarded third prize, three teams for second prize, and two teams for first prize. The prizes were surely attractive!
“First Prize, goes to the Malaysia Team and the Algeria Team! Congratulations!” Everyone was cheering for us.
Till now, I could not forget the moment when we were pronounced as First Prize winners. The whole scene was ecstatic. For the first time in our lives, we have ourselves a First Prize award at the International level. We made our instructor proud, we made our Huawei Malaysia representative proud, and most importantly we made our university proud.
As a senior year student, this was actually my very last competition representing my university. To be able to wrap up my undergraduate life with such an achievement, it was definitely a happy ending for me.
Throughout this six-month journey, it was definitely an enriching experience for me as a network engineer. Thanks to Huawei, I also got my certification as a HCIP-R&S (which is equivalent to CCNP) for free!
It was unbelievable that we ended up on a high note together as a team remarkably. Thank you my fellow comrades. Not to mention to our instructor, networking lecturer as well as Huawei Malaysia for all the support. It wouldn’t have been possible without their support.
I am writing this four months later as my first post in Medium to share my journey in this competition. I hope that my experience would inspire and motivate more people to take part in this great competition.
The take home message that I would like to convey to every undergraduate out there is that, there are many competitions happening around, join them and have fun while you can! Do you best, enjoy the process, the sky is the limit on what you can achieve. You will definitely thank yourself after graduating for making that choice! ;)
If you would like to know more, do hit me up in the comment section below! Hope you enjoyed reading my post. Thanks!