1st CCIE lab attempt blog and help for candidates.

Turgon

CCIEWANNABE wrote: »

Turgon, might I ask how much study time on average you put in a week? I am just curious. Right now I am averaging around 25-30 hours a week.

Around the area while I have been working fulltime. Should go up dramatically through August!

Turgon

A useful morning going through the 90 IGP/BGP questions on the Boson. Quite a good little test this one.

Turgon

112 Lab - IWEB vol II lab 7. Pretaging the home rack due to remote rack slot scarcity. Tonight and in the morning I have a slot book. Tuesday a drive to London then a flight Wednesday. More rack practice later in the week. Mocks, Vol III labs for core and Vol II 7 - 12 are the theme through August.

Turgon

Great shortage of equipment at home for this lab so compromises made. No switches so used a 6 port 4000 series router with bridge groups. Unable to download IWEB Vol II initial configs that would open with my winzip eval at home so no backbone routers. Certainly having to be creative here. Still it's practice and that all counts! Now working on configuring the 2 x frame switches I will need due to 4 port constraints on the 2520's..

Turgon

Turgon wrote: »

Great shortage of equipment at home for this lab so compromises made. No switches so used a 6 port 4000 series router with bridge groups. Unable to download IWEB Vol II initial configs that would open with my winzip eval at home so no backbone routers. Certainly having to be creative here. Still it's practice and that all counts! Now working on configuring the 2 x frame switches I will need due to 4 port constraints on the 2520's..

Im overseas now and today getting to grips with an unfamiliar PC. I will need to install SecureCRT. The time difference here may help somewhat with racktime scheduling. We shall see. 112 lab never got completed at home as I ran out of time before I had to pack and head off to London. A revisit of IWEB Vol III lab no 1 will be lab no 112. I shall start this one this evening or latest tomorrow. A battery of Vol III labs to get the core back on song, followed by topic specific reading, one topic at a time across Vol II labs 7 - 12 i.e IPv6, Multicast, QoS, Security, IOS Features..then a mock exam. To get started again I read chapter 19 MPLS in Odom R&S Third Edition. The chapter is about as well written as it can be and things are certainly starting to make more sense, but I still think that chapter tries to cover too much. Clearly I have a lot of work ahead of me to get to Version 4 lab standard in this subject. But that is for later. The key over the next five weeks is to demolish the core and the v3 subjects.

Turgon

Obligations with the family and visiting friends put the lab prep back until today. SecureCRT is installed. Let's see if some racktime has opened up now on the graded labs scheduler.

Turgon

Very little racktime available in August so I have grabbed all the agreeable slots for that month and also booked rack sessions through the middle of September. The first practice slot isn't until Saturday so I guess it's just reading until then. After just one practice session on the remote racks I have opted to take a mock exam the following day just to get a baseline. I will take a bit of a bashing in that one. I then have on average 5 rack sessions inbetween each subsequent mock exam attempt. Basically 4 mock exams spread across a month. Should be fun. Back to turning over the Vol III labs now and trying to commit some useful command line stuff to memory before the first mock exam at the weekend.

jason_lunde

Good luck! I'm sure that you will kill it.

Turgon

jason_lunde wrote: »

Good luck! I'm sure that you will kill it.

We will see. Looked over all the switching questions for labs 1 - 7 in IWEB Vol III.

Pash

I think anyone who can keep a thread like this going while studying for a CCIE in R&S, with a young family and a job, desevers a huge amount of credit.

Keep posting Turgon, we are following.

Turgon

Pash wrote: »

I think anyone who can keep a thread like this going while studying for a CCIE in R&S, with a young family and a job, desevers a huge amount of credit.

Keep posting Turgon, we are following.

Thanks Pash. We will keep at it. Just done reading switching questions across all 10 vol iii labs today.

bertieb

Pash wrote: »

I think anyone who can keep a thread like this going while studying for a CCIE in R&S, with a young family and a job, desevers a huge amount of credit.

Keep posting Turgon, we are following.

+1

At this rate its purely a matter of time before Turgon;
a) Achieves the CCIE
or (and)
b) morphs into some form of 12000/6500 series hybrid and achieves world domination.

Either way, good stuff Turgon, keep going....

Turgon

Thanks man. Ok went over all the WAN questions in the 10 labs in IWEB Vol II. A good refresher and no real surprises there. Time to study the IGP sections for these labs next.

dynamik

Pash wrote: »

I think anyone who can keep a thread like this going while studying for a CCIE in R&S, with a young family and a job, desevers a huge amount of credit.

Keep posting Turgon, we are following.

Has anyone tested for performance-enhancing substances yet? Like Crack?

Turgon

No testing but certainly drug free here apart from an occasional cigarette so I don't go insane. If I had taken anything performance enhancing and it had worked I suppose I might have got done sooner. Then again I probably would be living alone by now as a consequence. I think a few on groupstudy smoke crack.

Done with BGP across the 10 IWEB Vol III labs. Made some useful notes today.

Turgon

Time pressure getting to base forced me to cancel the mock exam. Now Im finally at my wife's parents place Im setting up the PC to do labs. Have a practice session looming in an hour. Very little rack time available this week although lots scheduled the week after so more reading aheaв in lieu of available rack hours. Completed reading and note taking of IGPs across all 10 IWEB Vol III labs. Will be looking over IWEB Vol II labs 7-12 closely the next few days concentrating on Ipv6, Multicast, QoS, Security and IP services. These tasks will be the core of my practice sessions on remote racks inbetween mock exam attempts. Will go over these tasks in lab no 7 this morning.

Turgon

112 Lab IWEB Vol II lab no 7 (second half). Had to plunder the solutions to get going. Never mind it's been a while. At least they made a lot of sense today. A good workout on IPv6, Multicast, QoS, Security, System Management and IP Services. Get some repetition going now and try to keep things simple and I should do well on these topics the next couple of weeks. Core is pretty good now, I just need to get tighter on these post BGP activities.

Notes to self.

Multicast - watch mroute
IPv6 - link local for frame maps with RIPng
QoS - recycle, update existing policy maps
Security - usually ACLs local to one router
System Management and IP services - pretty easy and often localised to one router.

Turgon

No rack sessions available until the 27th so it's a reading week ahead. Will look over lab 8 once I get this printer working.

Turgon

Went over lab 8. No big surprises on IPv6. For Multicast, Multicast helper practice and Auto RP. Security practice, ACLs again. QoS practice was useful including WRED. IP SLA the notable task in IP Services section. Interesting tracking of a link SLA to determine default gateway. Made notes and will look over again later today.

sides14

Any updates on the written preparation?

Turgon

sides14 wrote: »

Any updates on the written preparation?

none. It's all lab prep for the next few weeks. I will take the written end of September before it changes. I will need to read for about a week before I take it on as there are lots of specifics in there. The only people who find it easy use **** or have done it multiple times over the years so see very little changes over time. It may require two goes to clear.


Went over my lab 8 notes this morning before breakfast. More labs to study today starting with vol II lab no 9.

Turgon

lab 9 looked over. The second half. Tunnels feature on Ipv6 and Multicast. More QoS practice particularly nested service-policy. Security includes the good old time range ACL. For NAt I guessed rotary correctly but forgot the details. Ip services and Systems Management tasks seem more straight forward. The devil is in the details. more reading, more notes, more repitition and it should all come together. Mock exam 27th August. Lab no 10 to look over next, the second half of it. Having spent time looking over the IWEB Vol III labs a few days ago Im concentrating not on the core now but the later tasks. Multicast, Ipv6, QoS, Security, Systems Management and IP Services. These seem to be improving. Constructs are simple when boiled down. Keep it simple.

Turgon

Lab 10 looked over. Im doing better on Ipv6. Guessed correctly on multicast boundry. Need to work on the details. Same for lock and key access lists and some dhcp parameters. More useful work on QoS/FRTS. That's enough for me today. You can do too much in one day and I certainly have enough to think over for now. Useful toil. On lab day the doc CD will offer me a chance to look up a few obscure things, but most importantly act as a memory jogger for things I know but can't regurgitate the specific details of at the time. For that I need to keep on reviewing examples of solutions in action, understand how they work, get that awareness down, understand how to configure more things first time, then go find them on the docCD so I can get to those examples quickly in extremis. That's how to use the DocCD on lab day. Too many candidates rely on it on being available to bail them out on lab day. It is surely helpful but there just isn't time to use it for more than a few things and certainly no time to use it to teach you how to do something involved from scratch. All that work is happening now. IP PIM dense mode and full mesh requirements understood better.

Turgon

Labs 11 and 12 to look over now. The latter stages. There is still much to do.

Turgon

Lab 11 wash up.

ACLs are used everywhere. make a friend of them.

Multicast - bsr candidate instead of autorp. Tunnel over FR
Ipv6 - watch out from frame-relay map ipv6 using link local DLCI broadcast for physical interfaces. Watch out for eui-64 in ipv6 addresses. RIPng summary address. Use of distribute list to deny RIPng routes.
QoS - FRTS Bc = CIR*Tc/1000, Be = (AR-CIR) * Tc/1000
Security - May need ACL applied on interface both ways. Archive feature of syslog.
Sys Mgt/Ip Service - WCCP is a gift. ip directed broadcast for DHCP.

Lab 12 next up.

Turgon

Lab 12.

Multicast - multicast helper (again)
anycast ( need to work on that)

Ipv6 - distribute list to restrict RIPng updates to those longer than /64
OSPFv3 using ipv6 ospf 1 area 0 instead of ipv6 ospf network. Watch out for ipv6 ospf neighbor local-link. OSPFv3 totally stubby area. RIPng<->OSPFv3 redistribution. Fairly straightforward. Watch out for redistribute connected.

QoS - FRTS. Fragment in bytes i.e bc/8
Priority queuing - ACL, class-map, policy-map LLQ, add service-policy output FRTS to existing map-calss used for FRTS for prior task.

Security - Traffic filtering. Simple ACL called by access-class.

System Management - obscure ip access-list log-update threshold command to restrict syslog updates to 10 hits on an ACL.

IP Services. NTP - easy, DNS - easy.

So I now got through labs 7 -12, all the Post BGP tasks in these labs. Its proving useful work and pleasing to get through labs that have been on the radar the last few weeks. On to some more now.

Turgon

Lab 1 covered. Second half. Good coverage on FRTS. Picked up some useful stuff there as well as rate limiting. RMON came up. One for the DocCD. That's it for today. We are supposed to be on vacation and this has taken all day. Time to spend time with the family who have hardly seen me today. Bloody Cisco. This stuff can take over your whole life if you let it and that isn't healthy. It's the Tour De France of networking. More tomorrow.

Turgon

Had a chance to reflect on some of those topics covered earlier in the day. Time for pancakes now our boy is asleep. Will take on labs 2,3 and 4 at least tomorrow. Some serious notes being compiled which will be very useful. Expect to go through them all one topic at a time once I get through the lab reviews.

Turgon

Lab 2. Policy routing sticks out. Good QoS practice. RMON again.
Lab 3 and 4 covered. Finicky details in Ip services and such.

Healthy supply of notes emerging now which will be great for revision. A short break before looking over more labs today.

Turgon

Just got done looking over latter half of lab 5 questions and solutions. Made notes. Four labs covered today. Exhausting. Time to bath our boy and get him off to bed.