Lab booked + Paid

silver145

Lab is booked and paid for 23rd of Feb in brussels - Was aiming for the london ones at the beginning of feb, but felt more comfortable with the extra few weeks.

I have paid for this as to feel the "pressure" of having a deadline now which i am happy with!

Currently going through WB1 still to make sure i am happy with everything, i know my weaknesses pretty well and have a week course with global knowledge in november (cisco 360 - 5x full labs and 5x troubleshoot labs that week) this will give me a good grounding for how cisco does the labs! also tell me what i need to work on.

I have set my revision schedule and all in all i should hit 700-800 hours worth of revision within the next 122 days before the lab.

Luckily my circumstances allow me such time as i do not have a family or children and currently on a Graduate scheme, my girlfriend knows that this has been my goal while on the scheme so is fully supportive also! so win win, do it while i am a sad loner

joelsfood

Good luck silver145. Sounds like a good plan, enough time, and a route to do it. Keep us up to date

gorebrush

Feb 6th 2015 for me - lab paid for, hotels booked. I'm in!

silver145

Just booking Hotel + flights now, (going to the NH airport hotel) 250meters from cisco and going 2 days before my exam, also the flight home is the day after the exam giving me time to cry alone in a room and not be worried about making the flight ontime.

Purcahsed 1000 INE rack tokens for some access to switches etc as and when needed and have a course in 2 weeks (CIERS2 - 5 days of 1x full cisco 360 lab + 1x tshoot lab a day) so this will be a good "practice" of my current abilities and show me where i need to focus on more!!!

alot of areas i need to read up on more, "network services" "ipv6" etc. but making sure all my core is in tip top shape to begin with.

Nafe92014

From a recruit in Cisco studies, good luck to you Elites . Hone your skills and will succeed.

lrb

Good luck mate, mine's next month so hopefully we can get a few more TE'ers passed over the next few months! My only advice is to stay consistent with your studies, even if you only get an hour done some nights it all counts. Going by Cisco's lab blueprint, routing and switching makes up 60% of the exam so you should work towards being able to do most IGP (both IPv4 and IPv6), BGP (both IPv4 and IPv6), MPLS, multicast, and switching tasks without needing to refer to the documentation. You can almost bank on getting a DMVPN question (seeing as it takes up a whole section on its own under VPN) so if you can do this without documentation you are looking at another 20% of the lab that you can confidently without documentation, taking you up to 80% of the lab blueprint that you are confident with

Dieg0M

Good luck! Mine is in about a month, maybe I should book a hotel

silver145

Sweet i want feedback from you both over the next month

Good luck to you both!!

Aye i got the girlfriend to make me a schedule and most of my life is basically either labbing or reading! - I agree with your outlook LRB which is why my focus on the "network services" side of things is no where near as high on my priority list currently as the core stuff.

I agree in regards to the DMVPN stuff also, its just like you know a virtual link problem is going to pop up in Tshoot or the main lab also!

Doing the cisco 360 5x full labs and 5x t-shoots in a few weeks will show me how my "core" revision has gone and where i need to focus on next!

How has the final 3-4 months of prep been for you both?

silver145

Just completed a Cisco 360 full lab - Did crap on the end parts (as i have touched network services etc yet) - But i did rather worse than i was expecting

Top Tips: Remember the "Restrictions and goals" - lost about 4 points for simply not "advertising loopbacks with their full addresses (e.g ip ospf network point-to-point)

on other parts i felt a little robbed. I did not use a tunnel-key within my DMVPN configuration as it didnt state a requirement, only for DMVPN to work - If this was the real lab and i paid for a regrade and that was the only problem, would you think they would have passed it, or is the tunnel key 100% mandatory?

Dieg0M

Yea they would of probably gave it to you as tunnel key's only become important when there are multiple mGRE tunnels on the same router. For me, the hardest parts of the 360 exams are for sure the services and QoS parts. All the rest is pretty straightforward until you get into the redistribution labs that have loops and the L3 MPLS VPN's that require sham-links.

lrb

silver145 wrote: »

on other parts i felt a little robbed. I did not use a tunnel-key within my DMVPN configuration as it didnt state a requirement, only for DMVPN to work - If this was the real lab and i paid for a regrade and that was the only problem, would you think they would have passed it, or is the tunnel key 100% mandatory?

The tunnel key only matters if you terminate multiple tunnels on the same interface (e.g. Loopback0) because the router uses the key to identify which tunnel a received packet belongs too. In saying that, it doesn't hurt to just configure it anyway other than the fact it takes up another 4 bytes.

silver145

Phew, thought it was me forgetting something! my understanding was near enough inline with the above comments ^^ just one of those things to remember for the exam, better "safe than sorry" type of logic

deth1k

silver145 wrote: »

Just completed a Cisco 360 full lab - Did crap on the end parts (as i have touched network services etc yet) - But i did rather worse than i was expecting

Top Tips: Remember the "Restrictions and goals" - lost about 4 points for simply not "advertising loopbacks with their full addresses (e.g ip ospf network point-to-point)

on other parts i felt a little robbed. I did not use a tunnel-key within my DMVPN configuration as it didnt state a requirement, only for DMVPN to work - If this was the real lab and i paid for a regrade and that was the only problem, would you think they would have passed it, or is the tunnel key 100% mandatory?

Are you going through assessment labs? If so i've lost points too on silly things like using different tunnel key number, it wasn't a requirement to start with however their script was checking for specific number so i've had to raise a case and get my points back lab is graded differently so don't worry too much

silver145

i am

The reason there grading scheme sucks is because it was released along side of the actual CCIEv5 lab exam, most of the time went into development of the actual CCIE grading engine and we got left with the crappy remains that is cisco 360's grading engine! Overall the labs are graded pretty similar, except the V5 engine works haha (or i'd hope!!!!!)

finding the lab assessments useful though

deth1k

As I've been told by proctor after my lab, it's marked manually with an aid of scripts. He also mentioned that they don't reload your rack and check it as it is. I do agree, assessment labs are awesome aside of incorrect marking which can be corrected by raising a case

silver145

Good info to know, much appreciated for setting me straight

silver145

A good 3 hours theory then 3 hours lab with IPSEC vpn's today (dmvpn Ipsec/VTI's/Crypto map's/crypto Profiles/site-site)

If anyone is doing these on the CSR's you may run into the problem i did: If you mix AH with ESP in the transform-set the isakmp tunnel only half forms and throw's random errors.

silver145

a three hour lab session on QOS (one of my weaker areas as i have rarely touched it) and an assortment of hours into the night reading most topic areas and going over the commands in my head.

Today I will hopefully be doing more QOS if time permits (busy work day) and get my head around how the questions are asked for it which appears to be half the battle for QOS questions!