CCIE round #2

gorebrush

So, when are you thinking of doing the SP lab...? Any more ideas?

joelsfood

lrb wrote: »

Sometimes you don't realise how much you need a break until you actually take one.

SO true. Though, the break did slow me way down when I went in and did a mock lab session (a 4 hour block freed up at ipexpert while I was on break) last Thursday. Still, well worth the break.

lrb

gorebrush wrote: »

So, when are you thinking of doing the SP lab...? Any more ideas?

I had debated trying to sit the lab before the v4 came out but I don't think I will be ready to be honest. I will try to sit around August or so I think. I am in the process of learning stuff like github, Bamboo, vagrant, and onePK for work so this will probably take up some of my free time

I have also posted three NAT TS scenarios on my blog: http://packetdrop85.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/nat-troubleshooing-scenarios/

I have started writing some multicast TS scenarios so I will hopefully have this finished soon in a few weeks.

As for the SP study, I am slowly plugging away at the TE book so I will hopefully have this finished by the end of the week.

gorebrush

So how is CCIE#2 coming along?

I'm currently in a Nexus 7K course and whilst I would love to try and sit the DC - I wonder if the big blocker would be the availability of lab slots. Tempted to do what you are doing and do SP or even Security. SP seems a very good idea because it isn't one you see many people with and I still believe it is just an addtion to R&S because a lot of the core topics are the same. Plus I think MPLS+BGP rock my world so I think I would really enjoy it. At this point I don't even know if an SP IE would be worth bothering with because there aren't many SP's here in Wales, but for what I would consider a simple addition to R&S it would be hard to ignore this whilst all the R&S knowledge is fresh.

Though we do a lot of Security related stuff at work so that would be useful to learn as well. I think my next step will be to look into how easily I can practice this stuff. I learned that this was key to practicing the topics for R&S - nothing like good solid repetition and drilling to get the content down.

I can now do Phase 3 DMVPN+full IPSec (Preshared) off the top of my head now - quicker even than looking up the templates in the DocCD

lrb

Very slowly mate! I've been doing a lot of work with Nexus lately so I haven't worked on the SP stuff as much at work lately.

TE, depending on your exposure to it, is a very big topic especially if you are interested in the RSVP theory, autoroute, etc. A lot of people say to recent R&S grads "just watch the INE videos, do the workbook, and you'll be okay" but I don't know how much I buy into that way of thinking. I like to know the theory in excruciating detail before I can move on and I don't think IS-IS, MVPN, inter-AS, etc are exactly small topics. I'm still shooting for August and I think I am on track for that.

I'll start on inter-AS VPNs this weekend when I have some more free time, almost finished my multicast TS workbook too so I will pop that on the blog hopefully next week.

In other news, I start a new job in about a month! Who says the CCIE is worthless ?

gorebrush

You are making nice progress though - stick at it!

Yeah I've had a few nudges to join new teams at my place too, but not quite interested at the moment Got more interesting things to do like 2nd CCIE's

bharvey92

lrb wrote: »

Very slowly mate! I've been doing a lot of work with Nexus lately so I haven't worked on the SP stuff as much at work lately.

TE, depending on your exposure to it, is a very big topic especially if you are interested in the RSVP theory, autoroute, etc. A lot of people say to recent R&S grads "just watch the INE videos, do the workbook, and you'll be okay" but I don't know how much I buy into that way of thinking. I like to know the theory in excruciating detail before I can move on and I don't think IS-IS, MVPN, inter-AS, etc are exactly small topics. I'm still shooting for August and I think I am on track for that.

I'll start on inter-AS VPNs this weekend when I have some more free time, almost finished my multicast TS workbook too so I will pop that on the blog hopefully next week.

In other news, I start a new job in about a month! Who says the CCIE is worthless ?

Nice one on the new job man, what will you be doing with your new firm?

I haven't got my CCIE but I think once you get that you are almost certain for a job when you apply.

lrb

bharvey92 wrote: »

Nice one on the new job man, what will you be doing with your new firm?

Wanted to hold off in replying until everything was signed but I'll be a consultant for a big vendor I start in a month so I have a ton of DC stuff to read up on before then.

gorebrush

Nicely done on the new gig.

I've been offered one or two roles already.

joelsfood

Congrats lrb. There definitely seems to be lots of people out there looking for CCIEs. Even without having mine done yet, I'm getting contacted regularly too

lrb

Well time for my semi-regular update - I passed the SP written the other day. Not too difficult, and I would say anyone who has gotten their CCIE R&S would only need to read a few more books to be prepared. In addition to all the materials I have used to pass the R&S, plus re-reading MPLS fundamentals, MPLS enabled applications, a lot of RFCs (4364 is one you will definitely need to be familiar with), and a lot of labbing. Most of the platform-specific stuff I brushed over.

joetest

You're insane.
I'm curious - how much notetaking are you doing? That's a hell of a lot information you need to retain

lrb

Most of the time I pick a topic then create a new note in Evernote then start with a description of what it is in my own words such that I could explain it to someone who wasn't familiar with the topic, lab up scenarios, change little things, document my findings, etc. Most of my notes tend to be very large lol.

Only for very specific things do i keep succinct notes and it tends to be for things that I forget a lot. I keep these all in a single note too. As an example, the IS-IS multi-topology settings are different in IOS and XR so I made a point to document them to remind me.

joetest

Hehe the same way the rest of us do it. No shortcuts
I'm thinking about doing next test with handwritten notes.
Gl on the IE. I'm sure you gonna knock it out of the park by the time you're doing the exam.

lrb

So finished my first week at the new job and most of my work for foreseeable future will be nexus and UCS. I'm tempted to put the SP study on hold as I won't be working too much with ASR9K's and MPLS anymore. If I had to take a guess at how long I have left to study, it would be around 200-300 hours of labbing if I was to feel as comfortable as I did before the R&S lab.

I've gone through a ton of the INE DC videos which have been pretty good. Mark Snow is a pretty good teacher, but I found myself wishing I could speed the videos up 1.5x all of the time to get through them quicker. I've also done a few Cisco Gold labs on UCS and have an 8 hour sandbox UCS session booked out this afternoon. I must say, the DC topics are still quite new to me but I'm feeling more excited to learn about them than I was when I was going through the SP curriculum. Some of the other posters on here like joelsfood and Iris have also helped with the information in their respective threads.

I think I've fallen into the "second CCIE blues" that a lot of people probably go through after passing their first CCIE. When you get your number you immediately want to jump into another track and then when the buzz eventually runs out you realized that you have another entire mountain to climb :P

gorebrush

Yeah, I know how you feel. I started looking at all the DC topics and the one thing that continually puts me off is the lack of hardware to practice and I am not looking forward to trying to get slots. However, my employer has suggested that CCIE: Security is a good fit for them and that can pretty much be 100% virtualised like R&S, so I think a change of plans is on my horizon...

fredrikjj

lrb wrote: »

I'm tempted to put the SP study on hold ...left to study, it would be around 200-300 hours

Three hours a day for three months. I think you would regret not finishing.

joelsfood

Sounds like you need to switch to the DC track with gore, Iris and me.

I definitely agree on the speed thing. It's not just Mark/Brian, either. I was watching the NX OS fundamentals live lessons this past week and I ran them all at 1.2x.

gorebrush

Bah - I'm switching over to Security now But DC is still there in the background. I want to get another done quickly, I don't believe I can reliably achieve this but I can with security due to the fact that I can virtualise 99% of the whole experience.

lrb

Yeah I looked at it like that too but at the end of the day it's ~20 hours a week spent on studying for something that isn't giving me an immediate ROI at work. At this point in time, I think it's better I focus my spare time on learning something that helps me do my day job.

JoJoCal19

I know exactly how you feel lrb. I'm having to shift around my cert plans due to things that are changing with my role at work (promotion from security administration to engineering). I'll still get the certs I was wanting, but first need to focus on learning some other topics first.

lrb

So the last few weeks I've been heavily involved in UCS work, including an upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2. Really loving UCS as a computing platform.

In case anyone else is wondering how to make the jump from R&S to DC, I've used the following approach:

• Watch the INE CCIE DC storage (great series), networking (also great), and compute (eh) videos to get a basic understanding of where all the components fit in (especially UCS) and familiarity with the UCS manager and NX-OS
• Read Data Centre Virtualization to reinforce the theory
• Use PEC/dCloud labs (if you work for Cisco or a partner) or vendor rack rental to get more hands on
• Use UCS platform emulator to get even more hands on with UCS
• Use the cisco documentation as much as possible

I've got a few storage books and I'm about half way through reading the CVD for massively scalable DCs (good read so far).

I'm tempted to book all of the CCNP-DC exams in a month or two to see how I fare but I'll see how much time I have.

beingrad

Hi lrb,


I recently came across Unetlab and wanted to start using it, I am a beginner - and I wanted to ask if you could help me with a couple of issues I ran into. Not sure if this is the right place to ask but seeing as you have used it extensively, I thought I would give it a try.


I am trying out UnetLab using VMWare Player-


- I loaded a couple of Cisco images me360x-universalk9-mz.153.bin, c7200-jk9s-mz.124-13b.bin, c3620-j1s3-mz.123-19.bin - which I was able to add as nodes on the GUI, but upon clicking start - these nodes do not begin and I am unable to access the console (by clicking on them)


- I tried uploading ALU 7750 image - sros-vm.qcow2 (TiMOS-SR-12.0.R6-vm) - but this does not even get detected as an image on the GUI.


- The same issue with Juniper BR T4000


Could you advise what I should be doing or what I need to check for as I am unable to get this up and running?

gorebrush

lrb, what are you up to in terms of study nowadays?

Am heavily considering SP myself now v4.0...

lrb

gorebrush wrote: »

lrb, what are you up to in terms of study nowadays?

Am heavily considering SP myself now v4.0...

Finished up my CCNP-DC yesterday and my pursuit for CCIE-SP resumes

https://packetdrop85.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/home-lab-setup-for-ccie-service-provider-v4/

lrb

beinggrad, I would check with Andrea who is writing the code to see whether those platforms are supported. I have converted to using my own lab now (see my reply to gorebrush) and haven't used unetlab in a while.

gorebrush

Nice blog post - bookmarking that one!!!

lrb

Did 3 hours on monday, 1 hour on Tuesday, and 3 hours tonight.

Worked through the following on IOS and XR:

1. IS-IS addressing
2. IS-IS Authentication
3. IS-IS prefix suppression
4. IS-IS timers
5. IS-IS Level 2 defualt routes
6. IS-IS ATT bit / Level 1 default routes
7. IS-IS removing hello padding
8. XR RPL basics

My XR has been a bit rusty having not touched it for about 4 months but feels good to be back on the horse

sea_turtle

glad to see another SPv4 person is out there! I bounce between here, reddit (/r/ccie and /r/networking) and IEOC (SP general and SP technical) constantly as im ramping up for my attempt. I am through the written (v3 in mid april) and going through the v3 INE workbook with rack rental tokens and VIRL at the moment, once the v4 material comes out ill schedule my lab date and push through those workbooks. if you run into any issues or want to go over anything msg me here, on redddit (username is sea_turtles) or on IEOC (username is "nate").

gl!

lrb

Sounds good mate, feel free to ping me on here or on #cciestudy on irc.freenode.net. Best of luck on your studies too!

Another 1.5 hours of study on:

1. IS-IS DIS and broadcast networks
2. IS-IS packet types
3. IS-IS pseudonode LSP