1st CCIE lab attempt blog and help for candidates.

bertieb

Turgon wrote:

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.

Yes, but it just makes it more impressive (at least in my eyes) to see you sticking at it when it'd be easier not to do anything for a few evenings and let it all slip. Keep it up mate, we're all behind you with this* *not literally of course, it'd be a heck of a queue judging by the number of visits to this thread

nel

bertieb wrote: »

Yes, but it just makes it more impressive (at least in my eyes) to see you sticking at it when it'd be easier not to do anything for a few evenings and let it all slip. Keep it up mate, we're all behind you with this* *not literally of course, it'd be a heck of a queue judging by the number of visits to this thread

I think i'll second that for the whole site

Turgon

Thanks a lot guys! Just back online now researching something for work. I abandoned last night's session as we feel a little unwell at home and needed an early night. We are away on vacation this weekend so tomorrow will be the last day at work. Looking forward to it and I hope we are all feeling well enough for the trip. I may prestage the remote racks for lab no 9 and then save the configs for next week.

Turgon

Back in the country after a great vacation. Back to it tomorrow evening after work.

Turgon

9pm. Very tired this evening after a full day at work. I have 8 hours of driving ahead of me tomorrow as well with an installation to do. Will try and grab an IE slot and get the preconfigs saved for lab no 9 tonight to save me a bit of time when I do the switching section. Will most probably be too tired to do that tomorrow evening after so much driving so it's looking like Thursday night for that. Important to get the last two labs in Vol III put to bed. Then it's the mock exam cycle for a couple of months. With IE remote racks booked up quite a bit I will do some IPexpert labs and then my first mock of 2009. Then its more practice labs before the second mock. The cycle repeats with reading of Odom and Vol II labs thrown in for good measure. If progress is good I may well take a sabbatical from paid employment and really get stuck in fulltime for six weeks then sit the lab exam before a two week vacation and a return to work. If I do not succeed in lab attempt no 1 Im hopeful that the 6 week fulltime study should have brought the majority of things together properly so that I can return to work confident I can backfill anything else during evenings and weekends while holding down a job. Certainly finding the work/family/study juggling act difficult now. The whole daily window with everything combined is taxing and it's difficult to really get stuck into a lot of lab work in a single evening sitting. There just isn't the time or the energy for that. I shall have to get as much done as I can on this basis by the end of May and then evaluate the options!

Turgon

An 18 hour day that one. 12 hours of driving. Still the installation was a success.

When you are totally reliant on evening and weekend study a busy week at work and at home can easily set you back a week. The vacation over easter was great but I returned rather tired. This week at work has been a shocker. Pressurised and long hours. Saturday it's time to catch up on all the chores. House cleaning. From 5pm onwards it's rack time again. I hope to get lab no 9 done this weekend. That would be good. A start on lab no 10 before Monday would be great.

Looking forward to closure on Vol III because once done its time to embark on the rinse and repeat cycle of mock exams. Saturday is my best day for a mock and it will be hard on the family. But I must prepare for my first mock exam first. Vol III has improved my core. It's not perfect and I will struggle on some core tasks in mocks but its certainly better. Still things to work on though. Before doing the first mock I should brush up on the non core technologies first. IPexpert offer technology labs in all subjects. The labs only take a few hour hours. I will most probably do QoS, IPv6, Multicast and Security. Some of these I did early last year. Then I will try a couple of IPexpert multiprotocol labs I have kept in reserve to get into the flow of full labs again. Then it's my first mock exam. The baseline. Oh yeah, I need to brush up on FRTS as well. Will look over some Vol II labs for examples of that.

On that note, looking over Vol II labs, taking notes, reading my notes and reading chapters of Odom will help me with written prep as well as lab work.

We are in to the fat of April now so I will have to work very hard indeed if I am to get my first mock exam done in early May. Post mock no 1, it's more multiprotocol labs before my second mock attempt. Vol II will be my friend inbetween mock attempts.

No racktime available tonight. I have printed lab no 9 and filed for tomorrow night's rack session to save some time. An evening of rest now with my long suffering wife who has plans for lots of cleaning in the AM

Turgon

Well lab no 9 is underway now this evening. Switching done although it was quite straight forward. On to the WAN section next. Hurrah.

Turgon

WAN section done. Calling it a night. Early start tomorrow to finish the lab. Interestingly IE racks are fully booked again the whole of next week which kind of pisses off my plans to get lab 10 done. I can either find an alternative vendor for racktime who supports IE or bring the Ipexpert labs forward on proctorlabs. May try alternative rackhire, someone with the IE topology.

Turgon

A visit to the doctor this morning as the little one had a temperature. He's fine. When we got home there wasn't much rack time left but I was able to complete the IGP section before the session ended. Redistribution and BGP will have to wait until next weekend when the IE rack slots open up again.

I checked on various rackhire sites today for slots. Proctorlabs was booked until 9pm UK time so I have taken that slot. Other vendors it was difficult to determine if they really supported the IPexpert topology or not. One site said yes in an announcement but I could only find IE topology diagrams there so decided not to take a punt even though they had three or four hours available today according to the schedule. I was also unsure if I could simply pay online and start using the slot more or less straight away. I have seen other sites where you have to give 24 hours notice or so from payment before you can use the racks.

Thought about reconfiguring the home rack for IPexpert but I have no switches these days and the router IOS code is no good for many IPv6 tasks. Found some IPv6 exercises in Solie and Doyle to look over and I suppose I could do some of those at home with what I have here. Decided this week to take a punt at a few technology labs in IPexpert to brush up on non technology labs starting with, you guessed it, IPv6. The technology labs take about 3 hours to do so that sits well with my evening study schedule this coming week. I expect demands at work to be appalling the next couple of weeks as I have a major migration coming up. There is much to verify and many network and firewall changes still to figure out and schedule on infrastructure, as well as pre migration end to end testing and a network migration plan to hash out. I need to try and stop working through lunch and simply sit down quietly with Odom and read a chapter.

Tonight it's lab no 10 from Ipexpert workbook 9. This one is for IPv6. According to my lab study records it was last attempted on the 6th March 2008 (over a year ago) so it will be interesting to see how it feels this time around. I must say my portfolio of IPv6 hands on was woolly to say the least back then.

Turgon

IPExpert workbook v9 Lab 10 IPv6 - DONE

A good lab. If you do use proctor labs remote racks, R2 will not take an ipv6 address. I made R5 on the rack take the place of R2 and put it's fa0/0 interface in the correct VLAN.

ipv6 access-lists, ipv6 rip, default routes, redistribution, ipv6 host, ipv6ip tunnel

Turgon

Way too busy at work today. No lunchtime reading of Odom or the latest lab, IPexpert lab no 11. Got home and had stuff to do. Too tired for the rack session. Will go again tomorrow evening after another shocking day ahead at work. Tough week this one.

Incidently the Ipexpert ProctorLab save config facility is unavailable at present. Disappointing as I would have liked to have at least prestaged the initial configs tonight for saving and loading up on the rack tomorrow evening to save a little time.

Lab no 11 planned Wednesday night. Ipv6 Advanced Routing. Fun stuff.

Turgon

Another busy day in the datacentre. 7206 VXR bootflash and IOS upgrade followed by STM-1 channelized interface configuration. Various physical layer checks across the piece. Now on with proctor labs session and lab no 11 from IPExpert workbook 9 - IPv6 Advanced Routing. Looks good and should keep me busy a couple of evenings.

Turgon

Preloaded the initial switch configs, sorted the vlans and access ports, IPv6 addressed the router fa0/0 interfaces and the frame relay interfaces. ipv6 address FE80: link-local used everywhere. That's it for tonight. It's 10:30 pm, Im tired and I have another busy one at work tomorrow so I better quit while Im ahead. Datalinks all need verification. Im working flat out at work this week so I dont have to work as hard next week when we get closer to migration. This should free up more gas to do lab work in the evenings. At the moment I just feel too tired to do much after work.

OSPFv3 and BGP tomorrow night it is then. No save feature on proctor labs for my work in progress configurations which I will need to load up tomorrow night. So it's copy and pasting router and switch configs one chunk at a time for me which is a real pain at the end of your session.

Mrock4

Sounds like things are moving along steadily for you. Glad to hear the little one is OK. We had a scare recently as well. I've been getting about a steady 2 hours per night also, which makes it rough when you throw in 12 hours of work + 2 hours of driving per day. Lots of respect for you doing this for as long as you have..I just started and it is tiring!

Turgon

Mrock4 wrote: »

Sounds like things are moving along steadily for you. Glad to hear the little one is OK. We had a scare recently as well. I've been getting about a steady 2 hours per night also, which makes it rough when you throw in 12 hours of work + 2 hours of driving per day. Lots of respect for you doing this for as long as you have..I just started and it is tiring!

Thanks for the empathy there and the wishes for our little boy. He's doing better thanks!

Long day? No time to study at work? Tough commute? Family waiting when you get home? Welcome to the club :)That's about the hardest way to get through this track. The only advice I can give is to be patient with your preparations. It's going to take a long time to find all the hours you are going to need to make the grade. While it has been hard having to take so long over this because of lack of decent chunks of regular study time, recognising early on that this was the way it was going to be has helped me. On top of that many people have passed this way so there is hope!

A terribly busy day at work as Im now covering due to absence and I was already very busy with my own project. Tommorow will be equally fierce. I'm tired out. I will abandon tonight's rack session. 35 dollars down the drain. Too bad. Will catch up on Saturday. Two evenings next week Im covering for a migration so there will be no rack hours those nights.

So long as I can lick IWEB Vol III by the end of the month Im overall on track. May will be mock month and many technology labs. June, July, August will be the evil preparation months. Providing I work my ass off in May the following three months should take me over the top with a written pass and lab attempt in September. The summer months will bring the prep to boiling point. First attempt September with recovery and second attempt end of November if required.

But I must get more lab time in. Saturday is crucial for that to stay on track as only on Saturday do I have substantial racktime hours at my disposal. I must check IWEB slots and see if I can get the two remaining labs done.

Turgon

Friday evening we all had an early night. Everyone tired in the house. Another lost session. Woke up feeling more refreshed. It's 6am Saturday here so time for a massive attack on labs. The price you have to pay to become a CCIE. Grabbed an IPexpert session starting in at 11 to finish lab 11 and an IWEB session starting at 12 to finish lab 9.

Will cable the homerack now and practice things from lab 11 in the meantime.

Mrock4

Yeah, I unfortunately did one of the "3 hrs of rentals down the drain the other day". It was either take the little one to water park (like I had promised, but forgot), or go back on my word..so that went out the window!

I've learned that setting a time (ie: 8pm-10pm, or 5am-7am) is not a good method for me, but rather setting an amount of time to study. That allows me to be flexible to some extent, get a little bit of family time, but also get my studying done. The downside is that once studies ramp up prior to the lab, I won't have a choice but to extend the sessions for mock labs and such.

If your first attempt is not successful, that follow-up seems pretty ambitious..which I think is a good thing, shows you have confidence. I was thinking maybe 3-4 months space. Very interesting. I hope we see a number from you in 09'

Turgon

Mrock4 wrote: »

Yeah, I unfortunately did one of the "3 hrs of rentals down the drain the other day". It was either take the little one to water park (like I had promised, but forgot), or go back on my word..so that went out the window!

I've learned that setting a time (ie: 8pm-10pm, or 5am-7am) is not a good method for me, but rather setting an amount of time to study. That allows me to be flexible to some extent, get a little bit of family time, but also get my studying done. The downside is that once studies ramp up prior to the lab, I won't have a choice but to extend the sessions for mock labs and such.

If your first attempt is not successful, that follow-up seems pretty ambitious..which I think is a good thing, shows you have confidence. I was thinking maybe 3-4 months space. Very interesting. I hope we see a number from you in 09'

Strict times don't always work out for me either. A big problem at the moment is fatigue and in the evenings I don't get on racks until 9pm by which time I have been feeling pretty tired. Saturday or Sunday are my best days. I juggle the food shopping and family time and chores with the bulk rack time I schedule for one out of two of those days. Yesterday I took a turn with the youngster in the morning plus a couple of mealtimes and a trip out for grocery shopping and things we need from the hardware store. My wife took over the bathtime duties in the evening so I could get back on the session for the last hour. So I get more stuff done at weekends but I do have to take time out to do other things during the course of the day. With those things shoed into racktime running throughout the day I try to do less rack time on the Sunday so it's not a complete imposition on the family throughout the entire weekend. Today is Sunday so it's family day. No racks until later in the evening. The weather is nice and we are going out. Keeps us all sane here, especially my wife who is sick of Cisco and for good reason as it's such an invasive thing with so many important things having to be fit around those study hours.

Turgon

IWEB Vol III lab no 9 - DONE

Next hop processing in the BGP section was interesting. BGP was fairly straight forward. For redistribution tags were used. Been a while since I saw that.

IWEB remote racks let me down again. The configuration I saved in the beta control panel last time I had a session did not load so I had to clatter in everything I had done before from scratch. Relieved to get this one *finally* finished even if it is midnight. With work being so intense and things on at home my regular sessions have been sporadic of late. Feels good to chalk this lab off. Back on with IPexpert lab 11 tomorrow evening - BGP IPv6 practice and then IWEB Vol III lab no 10 over the weekend to bring closure to that workbook. Then it's the IPexpert multicast lab.

Turgon

Sunday 7AM - IWEB Vol III lab 10.

Kicking this one off now on the remote racks. Later today I have a ProctorLabs slot scheduled to finish off IPExpert Lab 11 Advanced IPv6 routing.

Turgon

IWEB Vol III lab no 10 - DONE. At it since early this morning. A good lab. Nice question covering line protocol tracking and default route injection. Forget IWEB Vol I, I covered the technologies using IPexpert across 2007/2008. Forget CoD and VoD's as well, I don't use them. I started IWEB Vol II lab no 1 back on 19th July 2008 and by completing Vol III lab no 10 today I have finally cleared the IWEB road map end to end, all labs in Vol II and Vol III completed. 30 labs all in. The last 9 months have been an intense and useful experience. It's all mock exams and revision here on in, fine tuning and backfilling until that lab attempt in September.

Closure on the IWEB labs. We are on track.

Turgon

IPExpert WB v 9.0 Lab no 11 Advanced IPv6 Routing - DONE

Finished the remaining tasks for this one on a proctorlabs session. IPv6 BGP, IPv6 NAT, IPv6 prefix-list, IPv6 redistribution all feature.

Turgon

This morning cobbled together the home rack topology for more IPexpert technology practice. Multicast is next. I have no switches at home these days but as the switching prequirements in these labs are light weight I can get away with defining bridge groups on a six port 4000 series router instead. Will have to skip any layer 3 switching requirements and configure what I can. Should be interesting.

Labs coming up through May include multicast, FRTS, QoS, Security, BGP, IP Features. We are busy the next two weekends at home so it's looking like middle of May for that first mock exam.

Yesterday's lab prep consumed the full day so it's a day out for the family today before another hassled week at work ensues.

Turgon

Ok well that's the prestaging of the homerack for the IPexpert labs completed tonight after work, IP addressing, frame switch, p2p and multipoint FR interfaces and bridge groups. It will be interesting to see just how much of lab 15 (Multicast) I can actually get configured with the old gear but we will see tomorrow evening.

No switches available at home so a 4000 with 6 x 10 M ports serves as a bridge.

Turgon

I came up with my own OSPF areas, EIGRP and RIP for this lab and did the redistribution with tags. A good exercise in itself and getting OSPF adjacencies over frame working. Then I battered the solutions for lab 15 into the rack. A great refresher which I felt was overdue on Multicast. There are a range of command lines there for multicast I will have to memorise so I intend to sit down with this lab and write it all down. ACLs feature a good deal with this topic.

That brings the number of labs completed of any consequence since I started this marathon to 101 labs. Im in a good place now. Just need to keep regular and keep working on the things that I need better recall on. More IPexpert technology labs in the weeks ahead. Also some reading. I took Odom to work but things are so busy there it's just a useless brick in a drawer. Constant calls from PM's to help bail out projects that have issues. Needless to say my working day is very full indeed and Im getting home rather tired

Turgon

A quantum of Quality of Service.

IPexpert WB 9.0 lab 12 Quality of Service tonight. A quick refresher building this out on the homerack. First attempted on 5th August 2007 and a second pass on 19th January 2008. Topics mostly understood by now so good revision to go over it. Worked hard on QoS at the beginning of 2009.

Turgon

Saturday spent out shopping and later keeping any eye on the boy at home. Study impossible except for the evening but my wife and I both needed a break once the little one was in bed so watched some TV instead. Today theory reading from Odom to help get the elephant out of the room (written exam) and possible rack work later today inbetween house cleaning chores. Back to that book..

Turgon

Last few days consumed studying theory for the written. Need to pass this in a few weeks time before all those lab slots go because the lab in changing in October. Tonight a break from that though and back on the rack. Probably an IP Expert security lab. Recently did 2 x IPv6, 1 x Multicast and 1 x QoS IPExpert labs.

Turgon

IPExpert WB 9.0 Lab 13 Cisco Router Security - DONE

Simply went over the questions and configured the solutions tonight in a rapid hour long session. I had a good day on theory today and almost decided not to do racktime this evening but Im glad I changed my mind about that. Security is my weakest subject and Im clearly going to have to work much harder on aaa, CBAC and the rest. A couple of weeks dedicated I reckon just to get my marks in this area to an acceptable level come lab time. My valiant but tired home lab did not support many of the features required.

It will be Lab no 9 tomorrow evening, ACLs and filters for IP. I will skip lab 17 QoS conversions as Im fairly sure these are off lab these days. Advanced Router Management (lab 16) and Router Redundancy (lab 14) I will save for a rainy day in June. Lab 18 Gre and Routing protocols, Lab 7 BGP and Lab 8 Redistribution will come soon enough in succession.

We have a wedding to attend this weekend so rack practice is postponed. I would like to do my first mock before the month is out.

Turgon

Run down with a bad cold today. No rack time but working on theory. Put in a practice test on netmaster and tonight battering out some old bosons. Probably do IPExpert ACL lab on the homerack tomorrow evening after work. Put together a useful spreadsheet today covering lab topics.