Passed v5 written - my thoughts
Comments
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PsychoFin
Member Posts: 280
Good luck man! Almost time huh? You really seem dedicated and very knowledgeable - let's hope it all goes well when the time comes!
Are you using exclusively web-iou for most of your labbing?
Regards,
Fin -
lrb
Member Posts: 526
Good luck man! Almost time huh? You really seem dedicated and very knowledgeable - let's hope it all goes well when the time comes!
Are you using exclusively web-iou for most of your labbing?
Regards,
Fin
Thanks man! Yeah another 4 sleeps (AU time) before my lab so getting pretty excited now. I have used Narbik's racks for 30 days (to go through his config workbook + TS workbook), INE's v5 setup (for mock labs and workbook), and for the rest i have used web-iou. Besides a few things not working (DAI, IPSG for example) everything has been great with web-iou. If I pass the lab I will post some more of my own small labs for people to go through which may help with their prep for the lab.
I haven't had much of a chance again today to study as I've been doing ACI presentations and papers for work. I'll probably go through a bunch of OSPF LSA and BGP attribute notes tonight. -
lrb
Member Posts: 526
Well my flight back to Australia and hotel are now booked.. better late than never. I arrive in Sydney airport at 9PM after about a 10 hour flight
![:\](https://community.infosecinstitute.com/resources/emoji/confused.png ":\")
It's unfortunate the way my work trip came about but there's no use complaing because I've prepared well up until this point. I cannot wait for a good night sleep before the exam cause I can't really sleep on planes.
Anyway, still haven't had a lot of time to lab.. just been doing the INE R&Sv5 mock labs just in notepad to keep my mind active. I've done all I can to prepare for the exam so it's kind of nice to not be labbing 3-5 hours a night anyway.
3 more sleeps
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gorebrush
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Very best of luck. Will be checking in on this thread regularly! -
bharvey92
Member Posts: 420 ■■■□□□□□□□
All the very best luck bro, you're a cert pass after all this prep work!2018 Goal: CCIE Written [ ] -
jamesp1983
Member Posts: 2,475 ■■■■□□□□□□
Good luck again. You got this."Check both the destination and return path when a route fails." "Switches create a network. Routers connect networks." -
Essendon
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Good luck mate, barracking for ya! Bring back that shiny new number! -
lrb
Member Posts: 526
Thanks guys it really means a lot to me all your support
Hopefully I can bring you guys back some good news!
Finally got in some more lab time! 2 hours today but nothing overly complicated:
1) BGP filtering with route maps, prefix-lists, and ACLs (INE v5 workbook) and some filtering with max AS limit (could also do the same thing with a regexp)
2) OSPF graceful restart and max metric LSA (A lab I have written up in lucidchart)
3) EIGRP unequal cost load balancing (Narbik's v5 book). -
lrb
Member Posts: 526
Finally arrived at the hotel, not feeling too crap from the long flight I really wanted to do some reading today but I used my time to relax instead, caught up on some TV shows etc. I'm feeling confident about the TS and CFG sections, but have no idea what to expect for DIAG.
I'll let you guys know how it went tomorrow night. Feels kind of weird to think that all the months and countless hours of labbing and reading all comes down to this. It's been stressful and tiring at times but I definitely wouldn't give up the experience. -
Lucas21
Member Posts: 46 ■■□□□□□□□□
I wish you all the best! From this thread it is very apparent that you've covered all the bases. However, I don't remember if this is your first attempt or not. If it is, just reduce the pressure on yourself by remembering that a very small percentage pass on the first attempt.
Looking forward to hearing from tomorrow. -
jamesp1983
Member Posts: 2,475 ■■■■□□□□□□
Finally arrived at the hotel, not feeling too crap from the long flight I really wanted to do some reading today but I used my time to relax instead, caught up on some TV shows etc. I'm feeling confident about the TS and CFG sections, but have no idea what to expect for DIAG.
I'll let you guys know how it went tomorrow night. Feels kind of weird to think that all the months and countless hours of labbing and reading all comes down to this. It's been stressful and tiring at times but I definitely wouldn't give up the experience.
You've put the time in. Try to get some rest and good luck."Check both the destination and return path when a route fails." "Switches create a network. Routers connect networks." -
lrb
Member Posts: 526
Just got back from the testing center then! The exam was not the 8 hour slaughter I thought it was going to be but it was definitely very difficult. I'll give my thoughts and experience with each section individually. I decided to resist studying in the morning as well, instead opting to have a nice breakfast at a cafe near the testing center while reading the news and having some coffee. I figured if I was trying to cram something in now than it was never going to work. I was confident that I had prepared well and done enough of Narbik's workbooks to know when to use a simple solution as opposed to a ninja solution.
I arrived at the testing centre about 8:00 and chatted to the other guy who was waiting in the lobby. He had used INE and 360 mainly for his study. At about 8:15 the instructor came and grabbed the three of us (2 R&S including myself, 1 DC) and went over the instructions for the lab.. no talking to each other, save configs often, etc. We then went into a room with about 15 small work areas each with a 24" monitor, a basic keyboard (Logitech K120 in case anyone is wanting to prepare the same) and some sheets of paper. I brought 2 bananas, some earplugs, and a chocolate bar. The instructor then left and wished us good luck.
Troubleshooting
The first section is TS and it's 10 tickets. The main interface shows the topology with all the routing protocol boundaries, IP addresses, VLANs, etc. I think there was a detailed diagram for each of the different technologies (L2, L3, VPN, etc) but I didn't look at it.
I went through all the tickets and marked down which where the 2 point questions knowing that each ticket should only have about 1 or 2 faults. I didn't find any of the 2 pointers overly difficult and had finished 6 in the first thirty minutes. Each ticket will generally have the expected outcome of the resolution such as a ping or a traceroute so it was pretty easy to know when you had fixed the problem correctly. By about 50 minutes in I had another two questions finished so I knew I was in good stead to reach the minimum score for TS.
The last two questions I found very difficult and these were unfortunately both 4 point questions. The topology has a few weird areas which took me a long time to figure out the correct traffic flow. Once I figured that out I finished the last two questions by one and a half hours in and I clicked the button to end the TS session.
For some reason I never realized that if you finished the TS early, you get credited the extra time to CFG. For some reason I was under the impression that CFG was time capped at 5 hours 30 minutes but this is not the case, so as it turns out I had 6 hours to complete the CFG section when it came around.
Diagnostics
There is a LOT of stuff to read in this section and I was constantly having to battle with the interface to minimize things I didn't need anymore. The questions are usually very simple "Determine, given the provided information, why X isn't working" and you are provided with things like console output, logs, support tickets, etc. I had the first two questions finished in about 10 minutes which was lucky because the third one took me right up until about 10 seconds to go to finish. Once again, not a terribly hard question but trying to get all the answers from the enormous amount of information you are provided was hard.
I know a lot of people have complained about the diagnostic section being a wildcard but it honestly was not that hard. If you have labbed enough, you have seen the problems that they are presenting which will give you an idea of where to start looking, despite the volume of information to sift through.
Configuration
Once I the main page of this section loaded I was taken back by the size of it. I would say the INE R&Sv5 topologies are a pretty good indicator for size but when you know that you are in the real lab exam there is a lot more pressure. Most people's strategies are to read the whole exam and then formulate a plan, draw diagrams, etc. To be fair, this was my plan before going in too. Instead I went straight to the L2 section and completed it from start to finish without even bothering to look at the other sections. I knew that if I couldn't get L2 to work then it didn't matter how good my efficiency plan for the lab was because literally nothing else would work. L2 took me about 45 minutes and I had all of the devices being able to ping their connected neighbours.
The L3 section is massive and probably took me close to 2 and a half hours. This is where my inability to formulate a plan was my downfall because the L3 section has some other dependencies from later sections, so I had to go back and forth a fair bit to get things to work properly.
One thing I did notice about each section (or rather, each subsection) was that there would be about 3-5 tasks to do but there would almost always be one "tough" task. Because you need to get all tasks for a subsection correct to get the points, you could spend almost 30 minutes configuring just to get basic connectivity working but not get the points because you didn't know how to implement some little feature.
I completed the next three section in about an hour and half so I had plenty of time to go over my configuration which was lucky because I had made some silly errors along the way. With about 30 minutes left on the clock I saved all of my configs again and decided to to make one last pass to verify the completion of the tasks. Most sections will have some verification output so if you take one piece of advice from this thread it is that you absolutely must make your configuration result in the same verification output as provided. When there was the output of a show ip route or something similar, I literally counted every line to make sure it matched. There are lots of clues in this provided verification output that you would miss if you were to just assume that your configuration was correct.
........ and now I have the nervous wait of wondering whether I passed or not
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lrb
Member Posts: 526
Have they given you your number yet?
Yep you get your number straight away - 45527! It's a frantic heart-in-mouth moment between the time when you get your email titled "score report" (which really has nothing in it) to when you actually see the result in the CCIE login. -
PsychoFin
Member Posts: 280
Awesome work man! I'm so happy for you! You really showed dedication and got the expected result!
Out of curiosity, how long have you worked as a network engineer? I don't think you mentioned it earlier in the thread
Congratulations again! -
lrb
Member Posts: 526
Out of curiosity, how long have you worked as a network engineer?
About 5 years as an engineer, 2 years before that in ops -
lrb
Member Posts: 526
SPv4 late next year
I just booked a spot on Narbik's CCIE SPv3 online boot camp the week before Christmas! -
Lucas21
Member Posts: 46 ■■□□□□□□□□
Congratulations! You've absolutely earned it.
Thanks for the details on your exam taking process as well. Great information in there.
There was one thing that I wanted to ask you for a little while now but didn't want to disrupt your study process. It is that you seemed to cover NAT above and beyond what seems necessary. I looked at the blueprint - both official and expanded INE - and NAT is just one subsection.
Looking forward to any more study and lab tips when you get the time.
