Doing workbooks over and over can make you pass the CCIE RS lab?

delanajero

Well the title itself says it all, how true is it that if you just do the lab workbooks ie INE, Narbik and just go through them over and over is enough to pass the lab exam...any thoughts?

mtjikuzu

Without reading any books, watching videos?

deth1k

assuming you've done your written (and read books before hand) then YES you can. I would use Cisco 360 though.

delanajero

deth1k wrote: »

assuming you've done your written (and read books before hand) then YES you can. I would use Cisco 360 though.

Yep I've done the written. Why Cisco 360? Is it just because it gives you the "feel" of how the actual lab exam is set up?

Kreken

This is how I am preparing although for the security lab. At the moment I am labbing VPN's. What I do is I draw a random network diagram in GNS3 - a bunch of routers and firewalls - interconnected with different kinds of VPN's; and then I create the configuration for them in a notepad. Transfer config to GNS3 to see if it works. If not, I troubleshoot it. Rinse and repeat.

Because I create configs from scratch for both routers and firewalls, I know exactly what is required to make it work and it makes the troubleshooting process faster.

delanajero

That is actually an awesome way of doing it, rather than a copy-paste pre-configured lab and then going from there. Its more time consuming but I guess the learning values is higher.

d4nz1g

i've heard that the complexity on the R&S lab is not as much as what i thought...a few coworkers told me that there are some ine labs way more difficult than the actual exam.
BUT, you need to be able to work on large setups in a reasonable time in order to make sure its 100% correct and as accurate as possible. that is the difficult part: verifying everything.

of course, you want to be prepared for anything that might appear, so you wont be repeating your labs. instead, you will use the workbooks to get familiar with a given setup and then work your way to different ways of accomplishing the same results, doing unusual stuff, creating new setups, and etc. have fun with it

delanajero

thanks d4nz1g so far its like in new information from labs and out goes things I've learnt weeks ago. so I guess doing things over and over eventually they'll all stick. Specially things that you don't normally use at work like multicast and fancy traffic engineering techniques.

gorebrush

If you are going to be repeatedly hitting the workbooks - don't do the same ones over and over again - try and get some variety. If you are ending up blindly completing them then you're not benefitting.

d4nz1g

but remember one thing: you will get used to the lab, so it will eventually become trivial. that's where you stop learning from the labs and should build your own methodology.

I like to make labs more complex, by using same AS numbers on different sites, backdoor links, authentication, qos, etc etc etc.
Try to do things in a different way every time. It also helps.

delanajero

I saw the Narbik workbooks adv r&s is it just me but in comparison to the INE workbooks, INE's labs exercises are more in-depth. So let us say this week I've been focused on BGP, INE they were getting into next-hop triggers, exist-maps, I didn't find any on the Narbik's unless i just totally missed them as I was only skimming quickly.