1st CCIE lab attempt blog and help for candidates.

jrs91

Wow, you've been at this since 2007? Remind me not to get married if I ever mention it here. :P

Turgon

jrs91 wrote: »

Wow, you've been at this since 2007? Remind me not to get married if I ever mention it here. :P

Pretty much but in a steady as she goes kind of way. Our first was born in September 2007 so the studies became background task from then on. Also worked fulltime as a contract Network Designer so constant deadlines there. It's been a positive experience though, just taken a long time. Last year I took an enforced break from my studies In May and prioritised my work during a reorganisation there, so I had a four week gap there followed by a two week vacation abroad. Since I returned end of June 2008 the studies have really ramped up. I would have to say that from May 2007 until June 2008 what with the little one coming along that period really amounted to foundation work, getting upto speed with all the various technologies. Since then it's been refinement, deeper understanding and better form. Picking things up quickly is one thing. I can do that, learning how to do things. But what's really important is the when and the why and what that may do to something else, that's the real skill and the layered way in which things really work. That skill comes from amassed time practicing and observing. If you are short on daily studytime, it will take a lot of elapsed time to get there. But it's happening. Lots of CCIE's take a long burn. 2 + years and multiple attempts or stalls isn't uncommon. Depends how you go about it and what you have on your plate.

Oops nearly 9pm. Rack time!

Turgon

The end of a very busy but productive week at work and on lab practice. I am very tired though and my wife is busy all day with our boy. We usually turn in about 11pm and start up from 6:30am, so with the evening lab practice sessions after work each night we haven't spent a lot of quality time together. I promised myself I would work hard on the core technologies this month, and I'm overall quite please about how that is going. I have been on the racks for about anything between 1.5 - 2 hours each night after 8pm and put a decent amount in across the weekends. I have decided to keep Friday night's free though so there is at least one night off in seven. You need a break and with no work tomorrow it's the best time to relax with an evening free from labs so we don't both get cheesed off with everything. This means Im abandoning tonight's rack session. Can't say Im sorry about that as I feel shattered. There will be more rack time ahead of us this weekend.

Going forwards it's going to be two nights during the working week on racks, and two nights reading with Friday off. The major racktime will be a weekend activity. I do need to do some reading and a couple of brief rack sessions midweek should keep me frosty configuration wise. Weekends become paramount. The rack sessions and the time difference suck during a working week. With commute time home and things to do when I get in I can start no earlier than 8pm. The session ends at 9:30 and then there is a break until the next one starts at 10pm. This isn't helpful but there's nothing I can do about it. With a half hour break it's difficult to get up for the session at 10pm and within an hour Im tired and flat out of time to carry on. I have been double booking sessions to do this but a shocking amount of time is getting wasted. While an extra half hour or hour each night adds up over the course of a week and does enable me to get a bit more done, Im inclined now to just work until 9:30 pm and then call it a night. At least it will force me to work on my speed and quite frankly with my full day at work by 9:30 I think it's time to call it day and get some relaxation before I turn in.

March is going well on core. April will be non technologies month and mocks. Vol 1, examples from Solie, Doyle and CCO will help me there, and reading over the Vol II labs I completed and polishing off my notes. Two nights of reading Odom midweek will help my written prep too.

Turgon

A day out with the family now and then from 8pm onwards rack time is planned to finish lab no 6. Lab 7 I start on Sunday. I have a brief window early Sunday morning followed by another session starting 10pm UK time. Interestingly the availability of rack slots next week is very poor the next best slot for me being next Friday evening. So it's highly unlikely I will get lab seven finished before next weekend. It's just as well then that I had some reading time in mind. In the absense of rack slots next week I will put in a couple of nights on the home rack and carry on with the Cisco Press Vol II Solie scenarios on Advanced BGP.

Turgon

A full weekend on the family front. Calling time on rack practice now. With a full week at work looming, 12:40 in the morning is certainly time to call a halt. Remote rack hours have not been readily available this weekend. I have at last finished IGPs on lab no 6. Will tackle BGP in the next session scheduled for Friday. As previously posted the rack slots are simply all taken this coming week, at least the ones I would be interested in. Getting through lab no 6 has been difficult the last seven days. I have been tired after work. I did manage to put some decent time in on the rack at home this weekend covering more on advanced BGP from Solie Vol II. I will be doing some more of that in the evenings after work this week until my next rack session finally comes around and I can chalk off lab no 6. A good lab covering path manipulation really well. Learned some useful things but it all took far too long as my evening sessions were late and I was just too tired after work to do much.

Turgon

Home rack - Solie Vol II Advanced BGP Configuration. Built out all examples of the use of the community attribute and community-lists on the homerack tonight. Beautifully illustrated in this book page 785 - 795

tim100

Turgon wrote: »

Home rack - Solie Vol II Advanced BGP Configuration. Built out all examples of the use of the community attribute and community-lists on the homerack tonight. Beautifully illustrated in this book page 785 - 795

Have you scheduled your Lab yet? I've read some of your posts and it looks like you are definitely ready to pass this lab on your first attempt, no doubts about it.

Turgon

tim100 wrote: »

Have you scheduled your Lab yet? I've read some of your posts and it looks like you are definitely ready to pass this lab on your first attempt, no doubts about it.

Thanks Tim. No lab scheduled yet. I want to get decent marks on mock exams first. Then I will need to pass the written again. I took a punt at the written some weeks back after going over the questions in Odom's book for about a week. I felt my passing chance was marginal but was suprised how badly I tanked that test. So I imagine it's going to be a while before Im in that lab seat. It's all good though, while my studying stints are regular I don't often get the opportunity to amass large chunks of study time in one sitting. Just too busy at work and at home. I'm getting there though. Next few weeks it's practice the technologies hard, read over the Vol II labs, beef up my notes and revise and then set about those mock exams. I suppose being forced to do the written again should at least help me with the open ended questions in the new lab format. Feedback from lab candidates has been mixed on those. While I'm all for Cisco doing the necessary to protect the CCIE I can't think of anything more demoralising for a candidate who didn't **** the written exam, and has prepared properly for the lab exam to come away from the experience of those six questions feeling like they didn't make the grade. It would be kind of difficult to get up for your lab exam after that. So hopefully written prep will ensure I don't have a shitty experience on the open enders!

Turgon

Solie Vol II on the homerack again this evening. Advanced BGP Configuration. Aggregate address, suppress map, unsuppress map, advertise-map, non-exist-map. The various exercises in the book used different topologies. I would have lost valuable time reconfiguring the physical layout each time, so the challenge was to reconfigure what I already had so the exercises were possible. All done. All useful toil.

apd123

I know some people say others results are not applicable I happen to be on the other side of that discussion. Either way for what its worth here are my dates and scores.
IPexpert Vol3, Lab 1 8-28-2008 28 (time management and just overall getting owned)
Assessor 2.0 9-3-2008 60 (felt I lost a lot of points to the grading engine)
Assessor 1.6 10-5-2008 76
IE Mocklab 1 9-16-2008 64 (lab is really basic I might suggest skipping it)
IE Mocklab 1 10-19-2008 93 (essentially a braindump of last attempt)
IE Mocklab 2 10-20-2008 79
IE Mocklab 3 10-22-2008 63 (found this lab to be really tough)
IE Mocklab 5 10-23-2008 69
IE Mocklab 7 11-2-2008 56 (don't ask)
NMC Lab 1 11-4-2008 72 (hungover woke up an hour late)
CCIE RTP 11-17-2008 ~78 (estimate based on percentages)
CCIE RTP 1-21-2009 PASS

apd123

Turgon wrote: »

Solie Vol II on the homerack again this evening. Advanced BGP Configuration. Aggregate address, suppress map, unsuppress map, advertise-map, non-exist-map. The various exercises in the book used different topologies. I would have lost valuable time reconfiguring the physical layout each time, so the challenge was to reconfigure what I already had so the exercises were possible. All done. All useful toil.

I didn't do this as much as I would have liked as I am weak and tend to need the structure of the 8 hour lab to keep focused. The sessions I did put in were invaluable though and creating your own scenarios seeing what you can twist where really helps.

Turgon

apd123 wrote: »

I know some people say others results are not applicable I happen to be on the other side of that discussion. Either way for what its worth here are my dates and scores.
IPexpert Vol3, Lab 1 8-28-2008 28 (time management and just overall getting owned)
Assessor 2.0 9-3-2008 60 (felt I lost a lot of points to the grading engine)
Assessor 1.6 10-5-2008 76
IE Mocklab 1 9-16-2008 64 (lab is really basic I might suggest skipping it)
IE Mocklab 1 10-19-2008 93 (essentially a braindump of last attempt)
IE Mocklab 2 10-20-2008 79
IE Mocklab 3 10-22-2008 63 (found this lab to be really tough)
IE Mocklab 5 10-23-2008 69
IE Mocklab 7 11-2-2008 56 (don't ask)
NMC Lab 1 11-4-2008 72 (hungover woke up an hour late)
CCIE RTP 11-17-2008 ~78 (estimate based on percentages)
CCIE RTP 1-21-2009 PASS

Thanks for taking the time to post that. Yes..mock exams. I trialed a couple in April last year. I left the experience feeling they were certainly useful. At the same time it was obvious that I wasn't at that stage ready to get the most out of them. I was ponderously slow back then and even 8 hours wasn't anyway near enough time to get through more than a few early sections properly. That equation has changed for me now, so I expect to be embarking on mock exams very soon. I should like to do one each fortnight for starters and then take it from there. One of the things that has hampered my progress has been a lack of regular *lengthy* sessions on racks. I have compensated for this by being very regular when it comes to hands on practice but nothing beats having the time and the energy to put in daily sessions of 2-3 hours on racks or more. Some days I'm reduced to little over an hour in the evenings when quite frankly Im usually tired after a days work. The only window for an 8 hour mock is the weekend so unlike yourself I will not have the time to do back to back mocks. I most probably will do a mock, and then rent out rack time to build it with the solutions another day to see if I can get everything working properly in a timely manner.

I don't expect to get owned in my first lab, but I do expect the mark to be poor. At this stage Im fairly good at configuring all the basic elements for every protocol, and I have improved on the manipulation of things..aggregates, costs, route-maps and bgp attributes, distribute-lists, spanning-tree etc etc. But I will lose marks on an inability to quickly pull together all the elements required to get a solution working. Im pretty good now at recognising what the question requires, and being aware of the options. However becoming really good at configuring right first time, the configuration I need is going to require more time. This is good in a sense because Im increasingly working on things I need to memorise as opposed to understand and this is improving with my practice, my note taking from labs, and with reading. Im glad I left the 'rote' learning until this point of my studies and instead concentrated on trying to understand what something did and how it worked. I committed less tedius configuration details to memory with this approach as I went along and instead tried to get a feel for things. Today I do understand how things actually work more or less, and now it is mostly a case of practice and memorization of details. I think a lot of candidates try to memorise a lot of stuff early on which is a bit counter productive. Get a few hundred hours in of quality lab practice and then you start to make beter sense of things.

On mock exams, I recall one candidate getting a couple of 50's on them before he went on to pass first time so the marks themselves may not represent what you are capable of on lab day. I do think the practice of taking an 8 hour graded lab can be helpful though. When I do mine, I will only use the doccd. Not personal notes. No books. No old practice labs to look over.

Home rack time now and more Solie Vol II. Advanced BGP Configuration. This evening a remote rack session to finish IE Vol III lab no 6. A busy week at work over and a late evening entertaining family who stayed over. Had a lovely time but I feel whacked.

Turgon

IWEB Vol III Lab no 6 - DONE
Solie Vol II BGP Advanced Configuration on the home rack - DONE

5 hours of BGP today. I configured all the remaining hands on exercises in Solie's book which brings closure to the BGP learning opportunities in CCIE Practical Studies Volume II. I shall never do them again but it was time very well spent. Pages 728 - 795. Private AS, Confederations, Peer groups, route aggregation, aggregation and route suppression, distribute list, filter lists.

Thanks Karl.

Turgon

IWEB Vol III Lab no 7 - Switching.

Got the switching out of the way this morning. One solution simply required the creation of trunks as opposed to all the port cost, port priority spanning-tree nonsense that sometimes comes along. Beware of over thinking the solution. SW1-SW2 had a direct layer 3 etherchannel. Requirement was to make traffic get from SW1<->SW2 the following way..SW1-SW3-SW4-SW2. Simply create trunks on SW1-SW3-SW4-SW2.

Now time for shopping with the family. Will carry on with lab 7 in the evening.

Turgon

Sucky problem with the IE remote racks tonight. I can connect but the saved config for the switching section is practically empty for some reason so I did it all again. Good practice I suppose. This time I used the preconfigs for the devices as I forgot to use them in the morning. Even so, other than IP addressing they offer very little. Tried a copy and paste from notepad to a switch and bam my PC rebooted. This has happened before and I imagine this old (by today's standards) PC needs rebuilding. Anyway. Switching done again with the preconfigs loaded and everything saved. Let's hope what I load up for tomorrow evenings session really is what I did tonight. Remote racks blow sometimes.

Turgon

IWEB Vol III Lab no 7 - WAN and IGP (part of)

PPP, CHAP, IP unnumbered, virtual-template, BVI and frame-relay map bridge 401 broadcast encountered. A number of tricky things. Pressed on with RIP and EIGRP then called a halt for the evening. Good work and things really flowed well. 'Advertise a summarized route for the 144.x.0.0/16 and 150.x.0.0/16 networks using RIP without using ip summary-address rip..
nothing in the docCD for that. Solution is to turn off auto-summary and advertise those networks in RIP. Simple. As Gandalf said 'Far too simple for a learned loremaster like me ' Mellon anybody? These labs throw a number of things at you like that. Just think clearly about how the protocol actually works. Often they are simply testing that.

OSPF and redistribution tomorrow. I even got a chance to peak at the lab questions on works time today for 20 whole minutes. Incredible.

Turgon

IWEB Vol III Lab no.7 - IGPS

IGPs mostly done. Out of rack time so will finish the redistribution and NAT session tomorrow evening after work. With a head of steam I may get bgp done as well and can finish the whole thing. Good timing as I want to start lab 8 before the week is out.

Read the IP Addressing chapter in Cisco Press CCIE Exam Certification Guide

Turgon

IWEB Vol III Lab no 7 - DONE. Configured at least. The BGP section is a little mysterious. Not sure about local pref in the solution. Some BGP peerings would not come up. Too many sessions, different racks. Perhaps some ip addressing got screwed up someplace. R4 - R5 ppp using ipunnumbered would not light up. I have a rack session Friday night so I will see if I can get some of the bugs out then. But it's done at last. Lab 8 next over the weekend.

Read IP Forwarding chapter in Odom's book today.

I stuck at it on core technologies hands on practice throughout the whole of March, working on racks almost everyday. It's paying off. Important to keep the work rate high throughout April now. Still some Vol III labs ahead of me but this month will be more about non core technology practice, with a mock thrown in end of April.

Turgon

Got the bugs out of the lab no 7 configurations. Now doing lab no 8. Switching was straight forward. Good to see some spanning-tree vlan x-xxxx priority 0, and spanning-tree cost xxxx stuff coming up again. Now looking over the WAN sections of the practice lab. Double rack sessions today..

dynamik

I've been away for awhile because I had to deal with a some personal issues, but it's great to see you're still working on this!

Maybe I missed this, but do you have a list of things to do before you're ready for the lab? I see you're at the summit, but I'm not sure how much is involved with that or how far along you are.

Keep up the good work!

Turgon

dynamik wrote: »

I've been away for awhile because I had to deal with a some personal issues, but it's great to see you're still working on this!

Maybe I missed this, but do you have a list of things to do before you're ready for the lab? I see you're at the summit, but I'm not sure how much is involved with that or how far along you are.

Keep up the good work!

Hi Dynamik.

Yes I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties you have experienced on the homefront. I hope things get more settled for you there in time. Things are going well thanks, although Im very busy at work and at home so slotting in regular quality study time is a real issue for myself at times but it's going ok. There is still a lot of work to put in but in answer to your question the work is cut out for me now and I know what I have ahead of me. I simply need to continue to put in as much regular time in as work/family commitments and energy levels allow. I imagine a 25xxx number is on the cards if I stay regular on this.

Just done with the WAN section on IWEB Vol III lab no 8. Plundered solutions to check some frame/bridging stuff.

I find CCO and Cisco Press great at explaining what something is and how it works. The examples then get you building it out. These are all illustrative of a technology, often in isolation. I find practice using these resources invaluable. The books by Duggan and to some extent Solie are about the only Cisco Press offerings that give you constraints to work against when you practice. The vendors do a better job at that to be honest. I can recommend the Vol III labs. Very good at throwing messed up frame relay, ppp, dialer, virtual-template, multilink, ip unnumbered and bridging stuff your way. I don't expect the real lab to be totally overloaded with these things because quite frankly if it was I don't think we would have the number of CCIE's that we do have these days (although I still think the numbers are relatively low). But there will be some of that sort of thing in there somewhere and if you encounter it and you are not well prepared I think a bad day at the office will most likely ensue.

You gotta get datalink right..switching, spanning-tree, trunks, etherchannel, frame, ppp, bridging, virtual-templates, ip unnumbered, tunnels, encapsulation, pruning, allowed vlans, spanning-tree costs, multilink..the works. No BGP peering without a lot of that going for you.

A short break now while I think over what was covered. IGPs later. Need to check on my wife as she is a little unwell today.

Neeko

How long is the CCIE Lab Cert valid for?

Turgon

Neeko wrote: »

How long is the CCIE Lab Cert valid for?

You have to recertify with a written exam every couple of years or so. Do that and you never have to do the lab again.

Turgon

IWEB Vol III lab no 8. IGPS done. A good section in this one with OSPF network types and different OSPF processes going on. Redistribution was interesting. Looked over the solutions a bit to get everything working. I will look this over in more detail when I next get a chance but it's got late here and it's been a full Sunday. Really needed to call it a night so battered through the IGP section. Anyway, that's the IGPs covered and some useful tips picked up, leaving us well placed to tackle the BGP section on Monday evening. Hopefully that wraps this lab up with just a couple of evenings left next week for lab no 9 before we take a deserved vacation far away from lab practice in the evenings and weekends. It hasn't been easy at home at times.

rossonieri#1

turgon,

all of these hard works of yours -
when the time comes, just dont let the lab beats you!!!

i wish you good luck!!!

ross.

Turgon

Thanks Ross.

It's touch and go if I do lab hours this evening. We all feel out of sorts indoors, I think there's a virus doing the rounds. Lots of coughing and spluttering in the open plan office today. Our boy is off his food and mom and I feel jaded and unwell. Will take an hour out and see if it's an early night or an hour practicing once the boy is in bed. Lack of study time at work sucks. About 20 -30 minutes reading a book on a good day is all I seem to get.

Turgon

IWEB Vol III lab no 8 - DONE
BGP went well. One peering did not come up so I went with loop and update source. Interesting use of 2 x route reflectors in a BGP AS. Use of local as and remove-private-as.

We have 80000 views now. The pressure is on to clear the lab before 100000

bertieb

Turgon wrote:

We have 80000 views now. The pressure is on to clear the lab before 100000

C'mon Turgon, get a move on

Only kidding, it's really good to see you're still plugging away despite a hectic work/family life. It'll make it all the sweeter when you do get your CCIE.

rossonieri#1

We have 80000 views now. The pressure is on to clear the lab before 100000

just imagine Anfield stadium with all those huge crowd,
except this time - the big match is between bunch of Cisco routers as a visitor team, and you - the hostmaster

remember, although we here at TE may not have the tickets to see you live out there - as always : big match ticket is expensive , we still can watch you exclusively via direct satelite pay per view TV channel

again, good luck!!!

cheers

Turgon

bertieb wrote: »

C'mon Turgon, get a move on

Only kidding, it's really good to see you're still plugging away despite a hectic work/family life. It'll make it all the sweeter when you do get your CCIE.

hehehehe..I think we will all be glad when it's over quite honestly. Certainly a little weary now. I would certainly like to put a little more regular time in but by about 10:30pm I really can't face anymore. Long day over and a busy one ahead. Im getting 1 - 2 hours in each evening from 8:30 onwards and weekends much more gets done. But doing the stuff each evening is a grind. I just wish there was time between 7am and 8:30pm but there just isn't any.

IWEB Vol III Lab no 9 rack prestaging tonight.